The Nuclear Policy Trilemma: Day 2

welcome to csis online the way we bring you events is changing but we'll still present live analysis and award-winning digital media from our drakopolis ideas lab all on your time live or on demand this is csis online all right good morning and welcome everyone my name is rebecca hersmann i am the director of the project on nuclear issues here at csis and i am very pleased to welcome you to day two of our conference on the nuclear policy trilemma balancing nuclear modernization alliance management and effective arms control in a competitive security environment this conference was premised on the idea that even as the united states government today seeks to advance all three of these objectives doing so inevitably involves tensions and trade-offs sometimes quite difficult ones as we navigate this sometimes complex terrain now let me just mention as an aside that navigating complex terrain is part of pony's two-fold mission uh we first have a mission to advance rigorous scholarship and analysis in the nuclear policy arena but secondly and importantly our job is to advance the community of next generation scholars and practitioners needed to lead these issues into the future in recent days pony has welcomed our new cohort of mid of our mid-career cadre we have opened applications for our flagship pony scholars program and our next pony conference featuring next generation scholars will be october 5th and 6th to learn more about these activities please visit our website nuclearnetwork.csis.org for additional details now yesterday we had two terrific sessions first our kickoff keynote uh discussion with senator angus king uh really helped to get uh get this issue going and was followed by a terrific panel on balancing alliance management and deterrence today we have two more panels addressing the relationship between arms control and modernization followed by a high-level discussion on the nuclear posture review the panel that we will be joining today is looking at forging arms control in the 21st century and they're going to be tackling a series of questions and you know about the relationship between unilateral reductions in arms control or delivery systems and whether that helps or hurts arms control what types of arms control might better support extended deterrence and a range of other questions for which we have a terrific panel now before i introduce the panel let me just mention a couple of housekeeping items first and extremely importantly i would like to thank northrop grumman for their generous sponsorship of this conference but also remind all of you the audience and participants that this conference is on the record is being recorded and a recording of today's uh event will be available on the csis event page uh some number of days after the conference you'll get a notification and we'll announce it on twitter and other social media so with that what i would like to do next is introduce brad roberts who has graciously agreed to serve as moderator of this panel uh and so let me um offer a little bit of bad background he starts at the director at the center for global security research and uh out in california since september of 2015 from 2009 to 2013 he was deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in this role he served as policy director of the obama administration's nuclear posture review and ballistic missile defense review he also serves as a member of the u.s strategic command's strategic advisory group uh and has held a variety of number of other positions uh in the nuclear field for a number of years uh so with that uh brad let me hand the baton over to you and thank you for joining us today as well as all the other panelists uh so thank you for being with us rebecca thank you thank you for the opportunity to join you today thank you for the opportunity to share the panel and to be a part of this continuing discussion i i'm grateful even despite the early start to the day out here on the west coast uh before introducing the panelists let me say just a few words to help set the uh to help orient us all to this topic this morning and what i should begin with the disclaimer the views i'm expressing are my own and should not be attributed to to my employer over the last two decades we have watched the slow but steady demise of the multi-faceted arms control regime that was in place when the cold war ended and it's common to hear people argue that it collapsed or or was done in by bad actors of various stripes in my view there's a more simple and fundamental explanation it lost its relevance and hence its legitimacy as the security environment evolved and the main actors began to shift their thinking about the benefits costs and risks of legacy approaches to negotiated restraint so today we're at a crossroads the best case is that we're in a short transition phase that new start extension provides a bridge to a future coming together with russia on some principles of continued uh arms control in in potentially different forms and that this agreement opens the door somehow to chinese participation and the best cases we escape an intensifying nuclear arms race the worst case is that we're entering a long period along interregnum dominated by new forms of competition new forms of instability and probably a heightened risk of war and our political instincts from an american perspective are are to lead toward the best case and hedge against the worst but so far at least there has been no convergence of strategic thought around how to do this how to achieve this balance militarily or politically our agenda today poses some questions right at this intersection right at this crossroads about how to proceed from here and rebecca has already rehearsed those with us uh our thinking on these matters must be informed by the the trilemma perspective that she set out and let me highlight two ways in which this is so first uh the domestic politics of modernization us nuclear modernization depends on a a measure of bipartisan political support sufficient for seeing through a project that's many decades that support is contingent on combining measures that appeal to both parts of the debate and the congress that is combining arms control strategies with modernization strategies uh when we when we've run the experiment to try to do one without the other the congress has been very reluctant to go along and the worst case result of a failure of arms control continued interregnum long-term stagnation is the political support in the united states for for deterrence will evaporate and there's an analogous argument to be made in the alliance and i know this was touched on some yesterday and i misspoke uh not the alliance in the alliances because there's both a nato dimension and an east asian dimension or an indo-pacific dimension and this is most obvious at nato where the harmel doctrine that's animated alliance strategic thought for decades that harmel doctrine emphasizes that the role of alliance strategy is both deterrence in daetant both defense and dialogue this is the alliance this is nato's own version of the so-called balanced approach of the united states and this these approaches are are put in jeopardy by a collapse of arms control political jeopardy so the end of arms control if that's what we're passing through threatens u.s deterrence strategies also u.s assurance strategies now let me invite the organizers to bring our panelists into into into view here uh i'd like to introduce our three speakers we're fortunate to have uh three very thoughtful voices on these these matters the first to speak today will be heather williams she's a senior lecturer in defense in the defense studies department at king's college london uh and she has her phd from king's college she'll be followed by dr jane vineman uh assist excuse excuse me assistant professor of political science at temple university and she has a phd in government from harvard and she'll be followed by dr tong xiao senior fellow in the nuclear policy program of the carnegie endowment for international peace uh tong is based in beijing at the carnegie chingwa center for global policy and he has his phd from the georgia institute of technology heather jane tong thanks so much for joining us this morning you each have five to seven minutes to set out a few provocations to get our discussion going then we'll proceed to moderated q a as you all know and i encourage uh folks in the out there in zoom land to to not wait until the end of the presentations to go ahead and submit some questions into the chat function with a q a function and and i i will moderate the discussion from whatever pool has accumulated at the end of the presentations so let me turn it over to heather thanks so much heather thank you brad and thank you also to rebecca and all of the organizers it's um real honor to be on a panel um of this stature um and great to see names out in the audience a lot of people who know this issue really well so just to get us started on this conversation i wanted to begin by focusing in a bit on allies and their different perspectives on various arms control issues and just to flag the importance of this it's uh you know as the united states is developing its nuclear posture review this is going to be a real a real difficult but important question particularly given the president's position on allies but it's also going to be important past the nuclear posture review having to do with them ongoing efforts at arms control and the strategic stability dialogues between the us and russia but to state the obvious at the outset and i think a lot of people on this call know this but i really want us to dive into it allies are not a monolith their views on arms control certainly are not unified within allies there are all these different views on arms control but given growing arsenals in russia and in china and the worsening security environment allies are a bit cautious about arms control at the moment and so whatever options the u.s takes going forward in balancing this trilemma i think our close consultation with allies and early consultation is going to have to be the priority looking first at allies who support arms control and some of the ideas that i've been hearing i'm in that space first is thinking about some legacies of the inf treaty many of these arms control agreements particularly from the cold war they directly impact the european allies russian inf systems probably aren't going to reach the united states but they can easily reach europe and they literally could have europe in the crosshairs uh so europeans have a lot at stake in arms control and i think that quite a few of them would fear this interregnum that brad so eloquently outlined at the beginning a world without arms control is not necessarily a safer world for the allies uh we've also seen in recent years leadership among quite a few european allies during the trump admin administration and so many arms control agreements uh kind of fell off and went away for various reasons but the allies they wanted to step up particularly in europe they were generating new ideas about arms control looking for possible options this includes work particularly supported by the german ministry of foreign affairs on arms control and emerging technologies but we also saw this with a lot of research and initiatives and non-governmental organizations particularly the european leadership network is just one that i want to flag we also saw a lot of the allies take leadership on risk reduction initiatives and this might seem separate from arms control a lot of their recommendations had were directly having to do with arms control and just one example here is the stockholm initiative and also work by the european union so we saw this group of allies really trying to get involved there is obviously a thread to this that has to do with the npt review conference and the allies wanted to show some progress not only in risk reduction but also potentially towards disarmament so that's that first group of allies and this is a simplification to say it's two groups there's tons of groups out there but i'll just kind of briefly move on to another perspective and group of allies which are those that have concerns about arms control and are a bit more reticent to see the u.s jump into additional agreements uh yesterday uh we heard a great presentation i thought from jessica cox and that entire panel uh really jessica said that one of the allies greatest concerns about the u.s nuclear posture review would be any unilateral reductions without binding and reciprocal agreements and that this included the launch cruise missile option that was proposed by the trump administration and so i think that's a really important point to take away when we think about arms control which is unilateral reductions on the part of the us even if they come with the objective of getting to arms control those are going to make the allies really nervous another concern about unilateral reductions and even potentially bilateral reductions uh would be increasing dangers of a conventional conflict in europe again from the europeans perspective they have a lot at stake here and they're the ones who are in that crosshairs so just to come back to that main point i made at the outset the main thing really is consultations this is another legacy of that of the inf experience uh quite a few hours that i've spoken to said they didn't feel consulted beforehand but they sometimes felt like u.s nuclear policy decisions were presented as a fate accompli so just to put some ideas out on the table to begin with um about how to engage allies on arms control and modernization i i'm really glad that brad mentioned the harmel report in his opening remarks because i i really wonder if we can take that as a framework to shape discussions going forward with the allies about arms control to say arms control does not have to be at the expense of your security it can strengthen it uh consultations i mentioned repeatedly um we also have to be prepared that even if the us goes into consultations with allies about arms control the allies might still say no they might reject us proposals for arms control uh and i i think that we have to start thinking about how to handle those um those situations and then just a final idea to put on the table which i do hope we can get into in a bit in a bit more detail um is uh discussions about arms control strategic stability in the context of the p5 process this has come up quite a bit um from my perspective i don't think the uk france or china are interested in engaging in the type of arms control the us and russia have been doing for decades and i think china at least has made that very clear for the time being but we can still use that process to engage the five nuclear possessors in discussions about risk reduction transparency of doctrine with the potential that that might lay some groundwork for future uh for future cooperation but in the short term i'm a bit skeptical about overloading the p5 process and expecting too much of it but just to reiterate the allies aren't a monolith on this issue and that's why engaging them often um and early is probably the the easiest the easiest kind of recommendation to make but nonetheless an important one so i think i'll stop there and turn it back to you brad thanks so much heather very thoughtful opening remarks jane over to you great hi everyone good morning um thanks to csis for inviting me to speak on this panel and like heather i'm very excited to see so much expertise amongst the participants on this session so i'm really looking forward to engaging with everyone so i'm going to start by raising three broad points which i hope we can revisit more first i'll scope the contemporary nuclear deterrence goals um and look at the conditions under which i think arms control can make deterrence more credible second i'll lay out a few considerations i think we should be thinking about in trying to evaluate the various options that are being proposed for designing arms control and finally i'll propose that like maintaining the arsenal through modernization arms control can be a hedge against uncertainties both those which we are seeing today and those which are likely to continue in the near future and um the takeaway that i think you'll be able to sense uh from my remarks is that i mostly think that there is no real trilemma or dilemma between arms control and deterrence goals they may appear to be intention at first glance but when we really get into it arms control is a tool to be used in service of both nuclear deterrence and general national security goals it's not always the best option um and it's not always a possible option even when it would be beneficial so let me first start on deterrence goals and how arms control is create connected to credibility so i think there's a fair amount of consensus um as others have spoken about as well that large-scale conventional threats or a nuclear first strike is not really the top nuclear threat scenario that we're mostly imagining that was the threat that was being deterred during the cold war rather today we're more concerned about escalation to nuclear use coming from a limited conflict and in that context other capabilities play a relatively larger role than they did in the context of the large-scale strike scenarios before however threats to use nuclear weapons in response to conventional attacks or cyber attacks these suffer from a lack of credibility while limited nuclear capabilities may exist it also may be hard to imagine that a state leader would choose to cross the nuclear threshold in response to a limited attack or uncertainty about where that line would actually be now i think that some uncertainty or ambiguity in when the u.s would be willing to use nuclear weapons may help deterrence but too much uncertainty makes that whole position less credible so where does arms control come in in this challenge of deterring escalation to nuclear use in a limited conflict i think that limiting the ability speed or capability to use nuclear weapons conserve to essentially add some certainty back in on when nuclear weapons would be used and emphasize the centrality of conventional capabilities for deterring non-nuclear attack these conventional capabilities are more credible in these scenarios and there's a better case to be made that specific escalatory moves can actually be selected and controlled as opposed to what happens after a nuclear threshold is crossed additionally arms control approaches that lower possibilities for surprise or misperception make deterrence more credible these constraints can mean that the threat of nuclear use or the possibility to escalation of nuclear use in crisis scenarios is seen by an adversary as something that is intentional and observable so next second i want to turn to um a number of ideas that are being discussed about specific design approaches for arms control and um sort of i think there are lots of ideas sort of already floating out there but there should be more ideas being generated and this is at least for two reasons one uh conditions have changed both in the context of new intersections with emerging technology and with changes in geopolitical relationships and sources of competition between nuclear powers and second arms control is hard most agreements are bargains where neither side is getting what it really wants both are settling in some respects um and both continue to doubt one another's intentions and are continuing to compete in other areas so the variations out there and the questions to consider include what should the scope of arms control be should it be within the nuclear context itself or should a bargain include both nuclear and non-nuclear capabilities what parties should be involved multilateral trilateral perhaps a series of bilateral what are the specific benefits and disadvantages of either of these any of these options um what are the contemporary compliance challenges what kinds of violations are we really concerned about how can emerging technology help or hurt uh in efforts to monitor and verify compliance should compliance terms be relatively rigid to effectively identify a violation or more flexible to accommodate changes in capabilities and technologies so finally more generally i think we should be quick framing the question as what form of arms control would allow the us and i'll speak from the u.s perspective but the same sort of point of view could apply to any country um so what form of arms control will allow the u.s to get to a favorable situation in terms of resilience and credibility of deterrence and the cost of being being spent on a specific set of security goals as opposed to others so for example a smaller more reliable resilient arsenal is as good or maybe even better of a deterrent as a large non-modernized one and a potentially lower resource uh costs in maintenance down the line so in this sense uh the us should prefer the smaller one and should prefer to exist in a world where credible nuclear deterrence uh is maintained with that more limited set of capabilities but that preference is only likely to hold if peer and near pure nuclear competitors russia and china likewise adopt this stamp rather than themselves relying on large numbers so we can start to think through how some carefully designed arms control could maybe provide a way to get to where the u.s would want to be anyway but where it would be a lot less appealing to go unilaterally and so finally i want to talk a little bit about hedging against uncertainty maintaining nuclear weapons um and efforts to keep them in working order through modernization um are a hedge against an uncertain future uh to quote the last npr um and there's a continued role for that there would be a continued role for that even without any changes in russian and chinese capabilities this would still be important um but there do seem to be notable changes uh which are introducing quite a bit of uncertainty into the situation for example as we saw with the recent publicity about the observed silo developments in china and debate about what that means or doesn't so on one hand this uncertainty suggests that uh the u.s should hedge even more in terms of the shape and size of the arsenal it will need in the future and perhaps not constrain itself but what i want to propose is that we should think about arms control as also another type of hedge against uncertainty it can be a hedge against the uncertainty that gives a rise to instability and crisis escalation through the pathway of misperception or miscalculation let's not forget there's a whole subset of arms control agreements that have long been designed to try and mitigate risks coming from miscalculation that is a hedge that is just as applicable now as ever and with more actors and changing capabilities probably even more so arms controls could also be a hedge against the possibility of the astronomical cost of arms races we'd rather not be having so maybe it's one thing to uh compete maybe in an area where you think you might have an advantage but far worse to spend resources developing capabilities just because you think adversaries are and you need to maintain the relative balance but in reality those resources would be better spent on other things including other military capabilities so arms control in the sense can be against a hedge against resource waste and finally using arms control to reduce the reliance on nuclear weapons is also a hedge in that it reflects i think a realistic view about other security threats and priorities where nuclear weapons don't play a role or play a role that is peripheral to most situations and secondary to other capabilities thanks thanks jane another great opening presentation tong zhao over to you thank you brad and thank you to csis for inviting me to this meeting i think most people would agree there is already the emergence of a strategic arms race among the major powers including the genius and china but i think the arms race is only the symptom of the problem and we need to understand the root cause of the problem i think the root cause is basically the two countries are talking about different things at the fundamental level the u.s is extremely unhappy about issues like human rights democracy xinjiang hong kong rule of law liberal international order etc those are about values political values that china cannot talk about because of internal reasons and china is basically attributing all the new tensions between the two sides absolutely and wholly to the structural change in international balance of power china is china's rights is challenging american dominance in the national system so the u.s is using those excuses of human rights etc but really to pursue a goal to prevent china from further rising so they are talking past each other and china really believes that the u.s because of this concern about its its position in international system has embraced and adopted much greater strategic hostility against china and in order to to contain that a greater american hostility there's only one way which is to for china to further build up its comprehensive national power only power will convince the united states to acknowledge and eventually accept the reality and this power centric mindset i think is very much behind the newly reviewed chinese nuclear monetization and expansion so the thinking i think is you know the u.s is no longer wanting to accept a chinese political system to accept peaceful coexistence with china under its current political system but we will use our high power including nuclear weapons to ensure that you have to accept it and there is no way the u.s can ever even contemplate a launching nuclear war a conventional conflict with china i think this political level distrust and perception gap is important because it also makes operational level engagement potentially less effective right because of this physical distrust even though from outside perspective for example american missile defense is very far away from being able to threaten china's nuclear deterrent but china would tend to think in the worst case scenario and try to develop much greater stat perception against this missile defense capability so even if the u.s is willing to make readjustment about its nuclear policy or missile defense policy under the physical environment it is hard to know how much reassuring that would be to china in other words containing the bilateral political perception gap and political distrust is really the key and high level english engagement is key to moving that direction it's very hard to make progress on this front but we at least need to recognize this fundamental reality it also means that china's nuclear buildup i don't think it's really about changing fundamentally challenging nuclear strikes china is now trying to develop first use or war fighting strategies i think china is fundamentally it's nuclear buildup it's fundamentally still driven by a perceived self-defensive goal i think to understand that means the u.s does not need to overreact i mean i understand u.s necessity to build up in strengths and deterrence but if you understand chinese concern i think you know there is no no good to to overreact by further building up nuclear capability um another point is as china becomes a more inward-looking society in recent years the new care experts just as the chinese general public they also live in an enclosed information environment they are increasingly susceptible to the impact of groups think it's harder and harder for them to break out of the internal echo chamber so i think we see a greater risk of decoupling between the chinese and american nuclear experts community even during cold war there was this epistemic community between russian-american nuclear arms control experts but today we are seeing this ep atomic community between chinese american experts is eroding so we basically need to reverse that trend because that presents a very serious long-term threat to a bilateral or trilateral a stable nuclear relationship so for that because of the lack of basic communication and understanding i think arms control talks even for toxic would be very useful and increasingly useful simply to keep the experts communities exposed to alternative information and alternative thinking last point i think despite all the geopolitical challenges i think arms control is still possible uh reportedly uh during the recent changing meeting between windy sherman and her chinese current part uh it was reported that china expressed a willingness to have a dialogue with the united states on arms control and just strategic security issues i think that's a positive development of course the question everyone is asking is how do we do arms control with china i think from the you know given the audience is likely to be mostly based in the united states so i think from the for the united states the us has very little leverage in terms of forcing china to do the types of arms control the u.s wants but u.s actually can be more flexible in how to engage with china arms control it should be more willing to take on china's proposals on arms control engage chinese ideas um and turn them into mutually beneficial matters for example china has been so stuck on the idea of no first use wanting u.s to adopt no first use i think u.s should be willing to take that idea and then say okay no first use is great but even if u.s adopts new first use china probably is not going to trust it so the key issue still facing the two sides is how do we make our both sides no first use policies credible and so we need to have a study and examine what are the standards and criteria of a credible no first use policy what does that mean for our fourth structure for our operational nuclear posture i think we can start that type of discussion immediately also china has been very keen to make u.s accept mutual vulnerability as a precondition to discussing arms control i think us can take that on and also uh basically uh demonstrate to china is that u.s has no financial problems rejecting mutual vulnerability with china the only you know practical challenge actually comes from american allies u.s allies including japan and other countries worry about the implication of u.s china mutual vulnerability for regional conventional security um so us can actually invite china to participate in the broader regional dialogue with its allies at the table and encourage china to also address conventional security concerns in the regional context also you know china we know china wants badly for the united states to address missile defense uh issue but you know a key thing is uh we have north korea building up these nuclear capabilities and the u.s has to address that threat from north korea so the u.s can invite china to have a broader discussion about how how if is it technically possible for u.s to build a missile defense system that can only uh intercept north korean icbms without seriously affecting chinese nuclear deterrence i think there are many ways to have constructive engagement with china on these concrete issues the key is to break down our abstract disagreements into smaller and more tangible issues so that we can start practical engagement immediately given the time limit i will stop here but looking forward to uh comments and conversations thank you another set of great remarks thank you uh let me start the the q a with um a point to each of you and then solicit your reactions and then we'll move into the the q a function uh to heather heather you spoke about the desire of allies in europe to step up uh to the to the new arms control discussion uh and um and then you referenced uh jessica's comments from yesterday about the way in which nato uh allies uh working together in a nato context have have thought about this in in the harmel spirit to balance deterrence and and dayton so to speak um would you say that the rest of the european deterrence debate has reflects some stepping up to the new security landscape uh is is there the balance in in the european discussion outside of the halls of nato that fits the new circumstance uh to jane let me pluck a question from from the the q a function here and it's from uh a perturbed john harvey who says um arms race what arms race i don't understand the us is replacing existing nuclear deterrent not increasing it as is russia and china so it's not a race because the u.s is not racing it's a build up by our adversaries that we need to address address in upcoming nuclear reviews what what's your reaction and to tongzhao um you you um referenced the constructively three suggestions at the end that could be pursued uh in in dialogue and one of the three was the discussion of whether the united states accepts mutual vulnerability is the basis of the strategic relationship with china this is a question as you well know that china has had for three decades and to which it's not had a clear answer from the united states is it too late politically for there to be any reassurance value to china of some such declaration by senior u.s leadership that it accepts mutual vulnerability is the basis of the relationship or is that moment passed because the clear messages come through that we're either ambivalent or we or we don't so let me give you each an opportunity to respond to those points and then we'll we'll turn to the q a function heather you first uh thank you brad for a really great question and i actually really appreciate the opportunity to speak to this um to the question of how is the rest of europe outside of the halls of nato stepped up to this new security environment so uh obviously i think that the answer is well it's been mixed um i think of it as three different categories of how of other reactions beyond nato member states and within nato uh so i think the first group are non-nato members within europe so you have uh you know like ireland and austria are the obvious ones that i'm gonna go to uh which have been leaders in the nuclear band treaty the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons tpnw and so they clearly have a different idea of what the security environment looks like or they are choosing a different pathway to try to manage that environment where they see the threat from nuclear weapons is a is greater than any potential deterrent value so that's kind of the first group um the second group would be uh you know ngos who have been very supportive of the tpnw and who are increasingly vocal they've been explicit that their goal and the next kind of milestone that they want to reach is to get a nato member to join the tpnw which uh you know evil delter talked about this yesterday would have really significant consequences for nato itself but also for that country their membership in nato would be um their commitment to nato and the nato treaty would be called into question uh and that so that group of ngos i i think of as the second bucket uh which you know for a lot of these for a lot of those actors they're activists they're doing their job um it is their job to put pressure on these countries it is their job to campaign i am increasingly concerned that they are not taking a long-term vision of what their action the implications of their actions on the security environment as most people on this call know these ngos are largely targeting democracies because that is their model of change but under their model of change we would have disarmed democracies leaving russia and china uh free to carry on with their nuclear activity so i think over the long term that that's a really dangerous approach and then the third bucket which i don't think gets enough attention sometimes are the other ngos who are trying to navigate complexities of growing domestic pressure around nuclear disarmament but also speaking to their security concerns particularly with regards to russia so some some people who i follow that i think are doing this really well or claudia mayor in germany michael anderco uh lukasz colessa who can kind of who i think really strike that balance of the harmel report and say we acknowledge this pressure for disarmament we also acknowledge the role that arms control can play here but nuclear deterrence is still a fundamental part of our national security and those those voices and others i think are a really important one and i just thought of a random it's not really a separate category but just sweden uh which is not a nato member but you know does not take the same position on the ban treaty uh for example as austria or ireland would so i think the answer really is uh how do other european actors view the security environment it's really complex i think we hear a lot coming from the pro-disarmament side uh they are more vocal that's for sure and we're here we hear a bit less from those other dissent those other views which still uh see a priority for nuclear deterrence but they're still there and they're a really important voice that i think we should all try try to engage with a bit more i'll stop there thanks heather jane great um thank you john for that question um uh so i agree i don't think we are deep in an arms race right now i think um what i'm suggesting is that there is a possible future scenario where there could be one um and that's the sort of disadvantageous um outcome that i would like to avoid so i think this is the right question right how do we address a build up by our adversaries often times historically the answer to that has been indeed build up ourselves in response so then what is the answer to that question that does not involve a buildup in response i think part of that answer is perhaps uh ignoring some buildups that are not actually threatening and are a distraction at best from what our real security priorities should be um and the second might be the employment of some arms control tools so part of the story here i think is that um how do we if we even if we believe that we are not in an arms race um how do we convince adversaries that we're not about to head down that path that we're not really interested in doing so but probably would if they did um so just saying so is often not enough as i think we've again also historically seen many times and what arms control agreements do as as international institutions is create some constraints even though states can of course and do exit agreements whenever they want the commitment to have a set of rules often ones that are monitored does create a con a constraint on behavior um and provides a commitment towards a certain path as opposed to the other one so for example um it provides an ability to even identify mutually what is a violation from a mutual agreement what is it that one side is going to see as a meaningful change uh by the by the adversary that would lead to a response um it clarifies um sort of what the what the meaningful violation or what the meaningful threat is um it also can limit uh ability to change directions quickly and secretly which is where some of the compliance monitoring and verification tools come in um so it allows states to more credibly say we are going to stay on one path uh that is not going to involve an arms buildup of this type um rather than leaving it open to being able to switch uh directions quickly thanks jane tong well thank you the question is is it too late to you know acknowledge mutual vulnerability with china to defuse existing arms competition you know maybe arms competition is a better word than arms race even though from the perspective of a chinese analyst i i do think there are already many elements that resemble uh an initial intensive arms computation that that could be called answers but back to the question of is it too late for mutual vulnerability um i think not necessarily so of course we have seen china already expanding its silo-based icbm forces so in some sense it's kind of late but i think it might still offer useful uh strategic reassurance given that china still has greater potential to further expand its strategic monetary capabilities you know there are reports of china experimenting with exotic new uh delivery technologies for nuclear weapons and we don't want to go down that road that road further so if we can't control the damage by uh you know you know taking some measures i think those are worth exploring i'm not claiming that u.s or china should make an immediate decision to accept mutual vulnerability it's hard for either country to do so the us has many concerns about acknowledging or accepting mutual vulnerability with china not least from you know there are concerns from american allies uh et cetera so the u.s wouldn't be able to [Music] reach internal consensus anytime soon on this issue and us wouldn't be able they both wouldn't be able to make a quick decision about this issue and china on the chinese side is a similar situation china has not explicitly stated what are its expectations for a mutual vulnerability relationship is a purely rhetorical statement from the u.s president suffice or is china looking for an explicit no first use commitment as an indicator of american acceptance of mutual vulnerability or does china think u.s acceptance of mutual vulnerability has to also affect future american capabilities on the ground does that mean you know the u.s has to follow up by reducing its certain military capabilities in order to to show up its rhetorical uh commitment to mutual bombay we you know the chinese position is also very very uh ambiguous um so we also need to engage china to further clarify its thinking and position uh but because mutual vulnerability is an attractive and important topic china i think the us should feel free to use it as as the you know initial uh as the entry point uh to open up a dialogue with china because this is going to be a process neither country is prepared uh to to come to a quick decision or conclusion so it has to be a process in which all those previously mentioned specific questions are addressed and discussed and jointly examined maybe we can turn this discussion into a broader and long-term arms control talk i mean that would be a great way to have a bilateral arms control discussion thank you all three of you for good good strong answers to the questions let me turn to the q a list here uh a question directed heather's way if we're looking at improving our consultation among allies and alliances does including more parties with only secondary interests risk increasing concrete outcomes by adding too many interests i'm thinking about the u.s u.k australian nuclear submarine agreement that upset france if we expand talks to include every friendly state with interests and so does russia china etc then does that simply devolve specific arms talks in into the u.n general assembly style discussions heather uh great great and very timely question i think i would somewhat challenge the description of secondary interests uh within the u.s uk australia agreement i i don't really see who in there has a secondary interest um without you know without getting too much into the pros and cons of the agreement itself um i think that the agreement sends a really strong message about how all three of those actors are viewing security in the region and i i want to i really want to emphasize that point particularly in the context of the uk um you know the past the current past two u.s administrations have made it clear that china is a priority uh for australia obviously i think that china's um activity in the region is a security priority and a top one um for the uk because you know for obvious seemingly obvious geographic reasons um in recent years you know being having been based in london for so long i think the uk was a little bit slow to pick up and to share u.s concerns about china's activities in the south china sea and in the region and so this decision i i don't think you know i think this is the uk saying china is not a secondary concern for us anymore we're all concerned about this um but that that's to that specific example kind of kind of more broadly i i mean there there's so many there's so many ways to skin the cab consultations there's so many different ways to have those it can be bilateral it can be multilateral i think that whoever asks this question makes a really good point which is those consultations do need um do need to be tailored to whatever the situation is i think that it raises a particularly big particular challenge for nato right 30 countries 30 different opinions do you involve every nato member in every one of these decisions uh that that's i that's not a new challenge for nato and there are really talented people there who can manage that um i do think one thing to point out for for us folks though is that our allies they really value the bilateral consultation and there's only so many diplomats to go around but this is where involving the state department and questions of deterrence and arms control and the nuclear posture is particularly important because the state department diplomats along with dod officials of course can have those bilateral just discussions uh which can be really frank and in conversation you know between friends hope and hopefully we can have those consultations and re-establish our friendship with france sorry we have about 30 minutes left in this session and we've got a long string of comments and questions thanks to the group for contributing to the list uh here's a complex question on missile defense and arms control with with a a tangent directed to all three of you to tongzhao as you touched upon do you think including missile defense in an agenda i as an agenda item for future arms control would be pivotal for china and and bring it to the table for dialogue to heather uh the nato brussels summit communique says that nato is open for dialogue on discussing missile defense with russia yet any red line that nato allies cannot make concessions regarding missile defense uh sorry something got lost in the translation there but um how do we balance this uh um how do we understand this openness to dialogue with the desire to not make concessions on missile defense and to jane what do you think would be the run line for the u.s if the u.s made missile defense an agenda item for future arms control tongzhao first well thank you um is include inclusion of missile defense going to be pivotal for bringing china into arms control i doubt it i mean you know given the chinese thinking that it is perceived american strategic hostility the increasingly unwillingness of the united states to accept china's current political system that that is driving very much uh china's comprehensive nuclear modernization um and you know it's hard to to believe that specific readjustment of missile defense policy alone is going to fundamentally change china's threat perception about its nuclear deterrent but i think to put that on the table uh to explicitly indicate american willingness to to at least discuss uh the issue of misadisons would be very uh important um despite the uh geophysical concerns about american strategic intention at the practical level the chinese milk experts uh they they are you know they still understand the importance of missile defense if if there is critical will to stabilize the overall relationship then missile defense could be a very important technical level uh issue to to start a conversation and the key thing is again we shouldn't discuss missile defense in a very abstract and generic generic uh manner we have to break down it into small and tangible issues that the two sides can jointly examine and engage in a constructive discussion so it's also about how how the u.s engage engages approaches china with the usual missile defense thanks so much heather uh well thank you for the question so how can nato balance or how can nato be open to dialogue on missile defense without but without making any concessions i i mean i think i think it's great to be open to dialogue um kind of the the spirit behind arms control i think it really hinges on two questions um the first question is uh what you know engaging on dialogue about missile defense to what end what would be the limits you know if we're working towards some sort of an arms control agreement that might incorporate missile defense you know um i've written elsewhere on how this could be an asymmetric exchange but what does that look like in terms of missile defense is it increased transparency about missile defense systems is it a legally binding limit not to expand existing missile defenses is a reduction in missile defenses um those are all i mean those are just three examples of what it might look like they're all three very different things uh and so the devil's in the details on that which uh is something that the nato allies would obviously have to consult with together and then the second question is um what would we get an exchange what is russia willing to negotiate away at this point they have offered you know putin offered up this idea about a moratorium on inf systems um i think i think it was maybe even been two years ago at this point um and most you know quite a few of the allies came out and just rejected that idea um so you know invasive inspections and limits on missile defenses in exchange for an inf moratorium i don't i don't really think that that is the type of agreement that the allies could get behind but there are plenty of other russian systems that i think the allies would be interested in seeing limits placed on uh so rather than an inf uh moratorium uh you know reductions withdrawal of the 9m729 just as some obvious examples so it really would depend on what sort of limits on missile defense are we talking about and what is russia even willing to negotiate away at this point thanks jane um thanks for raising this this issue of missile defense i think so from an international bargaining perspective there's no reason why missile defense shouldn't be on the bargaining table it's a capability like others so why wouldn't we be talking about um bargaining also we have plenty of evidence that suggests that um russia perhaps china as well is quite interested in talking about this particular bargaining chip now i don't know whether you know russian insistence that they want to talk about uh missile defense uh which is long-standing is real and genuine for an attempt to evade and conveniently disagree um about things but it's very difficult to discern which it is without actually trying essentially now while i can say that sort of from like the international bargaining kind of perspective international bargaining is just not just international there's very important domestic political um constraints and factors that play a role and in the u.s there is a very real i think domestic political constraint on missile defense and the question was about sort of you know what would be red lines for the us and i think one potential red line for the us would be um getting rid of missile defense altogether um i think that sort of not because it's sort of uh maybe strategically bad to do so but because of the domestic political factors um and political uh uh support uh for missile defense now having said that though um i don't think that um uh having uh domestic political constraints are necessarily bad when it comes to arms control bargaining it actually kind of creates a credible line about um where the u.s would walk away it limits the u.s bargaining position in potentially helpful ways but i think what that means is that on the u.s side internally we should be thinking um pretty hard sort of internal homework about how to use those domestic political constraints in benefit into creating uh beneficial bargaining positions rather than sort of using the domestic political constraint argument as essentially an excuse to avoid even thinking about missile defense as a arms control topic great points all thank you a question to tongzhao how can we encourage china to join a regional discussion involving u.s allies that are dependent on external and extended deterrence such as the rok and japan when china's preference for dealing with states it has issues with is almost always bilateral with the singular exception of the six party talks well i think the simple answer is because china really wants to have a mutual vulnerability relationship with the united states and the american allies concern about chinese conventional military activity is the most important obstacle for the united states to accept mutual vulnerability with china so i think you know this is not something u.s created as in skills but it is a real concern a real obstacle so it so it makes the case that china should pay more serious attention uh to address uh the concerns american allies other than that i cannot think of any other important and useful incentives for china to ever address uh you know conventional level uh security issues uh in the region um so i think you know it's in chinese interest to do so but the us needs to make that point clear and in terms of you know you know china's traditional approach of having bilateral discussions and against the multinational discussion i don't think that's necessarily chinese doctrine uh you know i don't think china necessarily sticks to that approach china can be very pragmatic and realistic in choosing the format and specific approaches i don't think you know bilateral is necessarily the obstacle if china sees interest it would be i think willing to engage in formats other than bilateral discussions thank you there are a couple of questions here that are directed my way there was a report filed yesterday in politico uh describing the intended reorganization of the office of the secretary of defense uh as it bears on nuclear policy uh and the uh the part of osd that i ran which combined nuclear policy and missile defense is going to be split assuming the report is true and implemented and reorganized under a new assistant secretary for space and strategic capabilities this follows congressional directive that a new assistant secretary needed to be created to prioritize space in the osd organization and this has been seized as an opportunity to bring back together under a single assistant secretary the the main strategic tools this is the organization in which uh this is analogous to the organization in which rebecca and i participated together in the first obama term when there was a global security affairs assistant secretary and then that was subsequently disbanded in the peace parts distributed among other parts of the organization so this new assistant secretary of defense for space and strategic capabilities will have three deputy assistants reporting to him or her well him uh the the nominee is john plum uh my former deputy known to many of you um three three deputy assistant secretaries won on cyber one on space and one on nuclear i'm sorry the space one will include missile defense so it'll be space and missile defense cyber and nuclear policy and the nuclear policy will combine the nuclear policy functions of the office i used iran focused on deterrence and strategic arms control with the functions of the office rebecca used to run with the countering wmd and multilateral arms control pieces this has been described as a uh and criticized as uh downplaying deterrence uh and uh selling out the deterrence mission to other equities uh i overall i think this is a very sound move um first of all to have the strategic capabilities all in one person's purview makes a lot of sense to me especially at a time that the department is focused on integrated deterrence integrated strategic deterrence secondly i think the the division of labor between the organization iran and the rebecca ran was always a little awkward in the sense that it wasn't there wasn't one-stop shopping for nuclear policy it was it was divided uh and the questions the two questions here are about um the implications of all of this for arms control and uh my view is this uh is is good news uh it enables the department to pursue a coherent arms control strategy in the nuclear domain not that we couldn't before um but but it should be easier with this approach and a more integrated approach to bilateral trilateral and multilateral arms control ought to be a logical result of the reorganization uh so um that's the the long context and the short answer to to to the questions put put to me um let me go back to the list uh there there are a number of questions here directed to uh tong zhao let me let me give two of them to you tong and um respond as you see fit what what is china's desired end state in the long run why why do chinese leaders feel that the continued buildup of nuclear weapon weapons takes them closer to that end state based on historical norms they must understand how a nuclear buildup will be viewed and and the second question is related you you explain the reasons for china's military buildup and say the us does not need to overreact however us military leaders have explained china's desire to be able to coerce the us to fulfill its interests what's your reaction to that and what should the u.s then do to counteract this goal tom well thank you uh for the first question uh why uh chinese nuclear buildup makes sense to china again i think china genuinely feels that the u.s is on the offensive and china is on the defensive and china is forced to strengthen its strategic deterrent because the u.s has become more hostile against china especially against this political system and and its ruling party as a result china has to have better capability to ensure the u.s would have no temptation to ever think about uh you know undermining the chinese regime and threatening chinese security and provoking a military conflict at any level so i mean you know the political level misperception is a fundamental problem but you know i'm simply explaining that you know china completely doesn't see itself as responsible for causing the troubles between the two states and and for uh for building up its nuclear forces and therefore given its perception that is a survival of the political systems survival of the country under anders current system is so important international image has to take secondary consideration and more important i think china has a view that the international system is fundamentally unfair to china the western democracies have inherent and intrinsic biases against this term there is no way chinese legitimate policies and national defense buildup will be accepted by the u.s so again power is more important if china can accumulate power to extend the u.s has to accept new reality then the international community will also fall far in line so i think this this power century mindset is is very important for people to understand the second question um i indeed i argue that china u.s doesn't mean to overreact i think the implication of china's nuclear buildup is mostly at the conventional level right china wants to make sure um any conventional military conflict between us and china wouldn't escalate to the nuclear level people may argue china today has a more ambitious conventional military goal including to resolve the taiwan issue through military means that may be true but from the chinese perspective our nuclear weapons including you know today's more a bigger nuclear arsenal is simply to make sure any conventional cop including a future contingency over taiwan will never go to nuclear level so it's the new care offers a cover and protection for conventional level military activity so i think if u.s is really concerned its focus might be you know more makes more sense to to be devoted to uh conventional level uh deterrence and responses if the us go i mean if u.s builds up its nuclear force it would further enhance the chinese paranoia that you know the u.s is fundamentally seeking something uh deeply threatening to chinese survival and i think the chinese reaction is is going to be doubling down on its current nuclear buildup if the u.s goal is to spend china into into bankruptcy then that makes sense but i think you know it's a debatable approach i'll stop you thank you a question for heather do you see asymmetrical arms control as the most pragmatic way to incorporate russia's emerging delivery technologies into future arms control agreements thank you for the question um short answer is yes the harder answer is obviously what does that look like um the more that i've written and researched on asymmetric arms control the more i've realized just how complicated that term um actually can be uh initially i thought of it in terms of making exchanges across domains and so i you know one idea would be legally binding limits on missile defense in exchange for limits on inf systems that's quite a few people have made that idea but i think with russia in particular now with their development of hypersonic weapons uh that is another kind of option for um asymmetric arms control to be incorporated but i thought actually that the president's comments in his meeting with putin also bring in these other domains particularly cyber um and also russia's disinformation campaigns and those are things that are it's just a lot harder to incorporate into arms control and so i think that while we might have another agreement um you know in us on reductions in strategic systems hopefully to include hypersonic weapons as well uh once we start getting into the details of making these asymmetric exchanges what does it mean for strategic stability uh it really does become a lot more complicated and i do think the cyber and disinformation angles are somewhat unavoidable um brad if it's okay i i kind of want to make a quick comment on something that tong said is that okay if i do that now um i i i keep coming back to something tong said in his opening remarks and as as ever tong you are so insightful we are so grateful for the insights you provide i i really agreed with your point on political distrust i i did want to quibble slightly with this um argument which i i don't think that you're making this argument you're relaying it um but this point that the us is emphasizing human rights as an excuse as an excuse not to engage with china or to set certain terms for the engagement um i i i think that's a bit of a mischaracterization from the u.s perspective particularly for domestic political reasons it would be really difficult for the u.s to engage with china in a meaningful way without human rights being part of that discussion um there's certainly a legacy for that if we look at the history of strategic arms control right um you know linkage to human rights was a founding principle of the salt talks it also underpinned reagan reagan's work on cfe and salt or on start i'm in inf and so that linkage from the u.s perspective i i think is really important i don't have the solution for how to handle it but i think that also gets to the domestic issue of mutual vulnerability for for my interpretation the allies are will be a challenge if in the us's consideration of whether or not to accept mutual vulnerability but it's also a domestic issue um and how that's going to look to domestic audiences um in an increasingly polarized country that that you know mutual vulnerability will get politicized here if it hasn't already um and so you know the us response this isn't just about china's nuclear capabilities it's also about the wider set of non-nuclear capabilities as well and how that's going to be interpreted again not just by allies but domestically um but you know tom you've written elsewhere i think i'm and you've mentioned it here that what i think is probably the best one of the best ways forward which is to use multi mutual vulnerability as an opening point for dialogue and and discussion whether that's multilaterally bilaterally um i think that was actually published in the cgsr volume brad so uh i just wanted to find that i think that's a really sensible way forward but from the us perspective i think human rights is unavoidable and there are domestic political challenges as well tong would you like to comment um sure that's you know a great uh question um you know i completely agree with with hazard about the importance of of having constructive discussions and try to narrow the two sides big perception gap as the political level including address to address the human rights and democracy and and you know democrat values all of the issues rural law et cetera is but for the same domestic reasons those issues uh you know uh are completely out of hand uh of of analysts like me uh unless i'm seeking trouble um there's no way for me to make a judgment about the chinese approach and chinese perspective the best i can do under the political environment is to explain the chinese perspective as accurately as possible as much as i can i do hope of course the physical leadership could would have the political willingness to engage on these fundamental issues because these issues are the greatest challenge to armed central corpus to any cooperation between u.s and china and between china and the western countries thank you a question to jane you describe the challenges around verifying compliance with arms control could you describe what you see as the best way to approach this challenge among the options you mentioned or which methods would be most adapted to different types of arms control agreements and might dialogue on these challenges be one way to bring arms control debate back toward the technical community as recommended by tong xiao um thanks yeah so i think um well a couple of things on the sort of the verification um and compliance challenges um one of the things that i've been thinking about is sort of how do we um start to think more creatively about solving the problems of verifying different capabilities um technical communities have been doing research and development on thinking about how to potentially verify warheads and how can different technologies help us think about whether we can verify restraints on uh mobile missiles for example so essentially i think these verification challenges they're sort of like old problems that keep recurring but need sort of increasingly um more creative uh technical solutions because sort of the fundamental problem is that we might want to verify uh compliance and sort of go in and check everything to make sure an adversary is complying but in doing so that creates a security threat for the adversary and for us right you wouldn't want uh inspectors running around everywhere in the u.s checking uh things seeing things we might not want them to see so there's sort of there's a trade-off between wanting to verify compliance and also wanting to protect secrecy and that desire to protect secrecy um needs to be i think a bigger part of the evaluation and thinking about um measures so in that light i think going forward um there should be a conversation about re-examining the role of unilateral measures particularly as we're seeing uh such um uh big advances in remote sensing satellite imagery right and particularly in ways where publicly accessible information um might be more available for these kinds of activities than it has been before there are considerable advantages to using um publicly shareable methods as opposed to intelligence information in order to deal with compliance problems and i think that could be a potential path forward we also need to think about sort of what kind of um i guess inspection level is intrusive enough without being too intrusive um and really think about sort of what sort of the acceptable uh level of error rate uh that we'd be willing to live with in an arms control agreement i think on the technical side and on the expert side um people are very aware of this that you can't get perfect and perfect verification that there's sort of always a certain probability of missing something that you live with but on the public side and the public support for arms control side um this can all this can be missed and um agreements can be criticized for not being sufficiently good at uh catching violations because the sort of you know the the monitoring is not perfect to which i would say of course it's not perfect if we wanted a perfect monitoring regime you wouldn't have an agreement in the first place because of those security concerns um and on this point of bringing the technical community back in and sort of what assam mentioned sort of the potential for for dialogue in that space um i think this is a promising direction it is a tool that's been used before and the u.s and soviet union used a technical cooperation um before to explore uh monitoring and verification options sometimes with pretty good results and i think the specific role or goal that can be posed to a technical community should be on verification tools that recognize and protect legitimate concerns that agreement parties would have on protecting security secrets again not a new challenge the technical community i think has worked on this before um is familiar with this but uh i see me that doing so collaboratively might be good not only in sort of coming up with some new solutions but also in creating a process for reassuring adversaries that um verification tools might not be um as threatening to security um as they might appear that's a process that's sort of well established between us and russia less established with china thanks jane i have lots of questions left in the in the queue here but we only have four minutes left in this session let me let me give each of you an opportunity to say anything you might wish to say at this point either in response to something you've heard or some other topic that hasn't come up that you'd like to address uh being mindful of the short time we have left let me go in the order of the agenda start with heather then jane then tong and if there's not anything please feel free to say so um i have a very quick comment about declaratory policy my main point of the opening was that allies are not a monolith but perhaps the one thing that from what i can gather allies are pretty united on is their skepticism about um a shift to no first use and sole purpose and that came through really strongly um in the discussion yesterday and so we didn't get to it too much in in the discussion um under understandably but uh just to kind of re-emphasize that there does seem to be ally unity in um questioning the value of switching to sole purpose or no first use and definitely skepticism about any unilateral reductions on the us's part but with that i i really just want to thank brad and everyone else again this was a really great panel thanks heather jane um thanks so um i'll just say that um although i think i've been sort of framing a lot of my comments and thinking about sort of here's how arms control could be an option for x i do think that in the current environment um it is a very difficult and complicated option uh to pursue and will be so even though i think we should still sort of try and explore it it's going to be a challenging one for a lot of the reasons that have been raised and a lot of the sort of um lack of alignment between certain interests of different countries that both heather and tong have raised um so um i'm interested in sort of you know engaging further with a lot of the participants on in this session um on sort of further exploring of what i think is a very complicated issue thanks jane tong um and i think despite the very problematic geophysical environment which means this competition is going to be long-term and very ugly but that i think highlights the need for for efforts to to contain the risks of arms race and and crisis instability etc there are so many things that actually can be done at the operational level there are so many misunderstandings about specific policies that can be cleared up in operational level engagement there are so many ways to have constructive dialogues or joined studies on mutual or multi-natural disagreements and disputes on nuclear weapons missile defense space security etc so we we we shouldn't be too um pessimistic there are always things we can do concretely to make a difference i want to crack one of my former comments i i said you know u.s william is to talk missile defense probably wouldn't fundamentally change chinese approach and policy but i think it wouldn't hurt for the united states to try i put the issue on the table making some mutually beneficial uh and specific proposals and see how china responds you know at this time the risk is so high that we cannot uh try anything possible at our disposal right recent chinese new casper said we're heading down a road that that very much resembles the u.s soviet union arms race during the early stage of cold war it might take a cuban missile crisis type of serious incident to really shock the decision makers into into thinking things differently we i think there are things we can do today to preemptively defuse tensions and reduce the risks that's not here thanks tong at this point in the proceedings if we were meeting face to face i would invite the audience to join me in thanking the three of you for excellent presentations and excellent discussion along the way so you just have to imagine that um but uh thank you very much for for uh very thoughtful and interesting discussion this morning an excellent addition to an already strong program at this point we will uh take a 15-minute break and reconvene at the quarter pa quarter of the hour in whatever time zone you may be uh thanks so much to all of you be safe out there so in case you are just joining or rejoining my name is rebecca hersmann i am the director of the project on nuclear issues and i am pleased to welcome you all to this our final session of this year's new uh open uh public pony conference focusing on the nuclear trilemma uh so very pleased to have you here we had a terrific panel just completed i really want to thank brad roberts for sharing that discussion on the future of arms control in the trilemma um and for the participation of jane bayman tongzhou and heather williams so it was a really great discussion um but now on to our final plan panel where we have also an outstanding group of experts uh joining us in this session we hope to wrap up and synthesize many of the most salient aspects of the nuclear trilemma and its implications for the future of u.s nuclear strategy to do this i've asked each of our panelists to offer five to seven minutes of opening remarks focusing on their recommendations for how the biden administration should address the three nuclear priorities identified in this conference supporting and strengthening u.s alliances meeting the essential modernization needs of our nuclear forces and related systems and rejuvenating arms control to reduce nuclear risks all of this in the context of the upcoming nuclear posture review which we expect to be embedded in um a broader uh national defense strategy in which uh integrated deterrence is expected to play a very prominent role so i'm really looking forward to these uh recommendations and the kind of range of views i expect them to to reflect we have three terrific experts and let me um offer a brief summary of their extensive bios uh and their my gratitude and then we'll dive right in so first up will be lynn rustin who is the vice president for nti's global nuclear policy program before joining nti uh lin served as the senior director for arms control and non-proliferation on the white house national security council staff and held positions in the department of state uh both in the uh is n and the abc bureaus she was a senior professional staff member on the senate house armed service senate armed services committee and served as the director of the national academy of sciences committee on international security and arms control truly a long background in arms control and nuclear policy she will be followed by dr chris ford who is currently a senior advisor at the mitre corporation prior to that he was assistant secretary for international security and non-proliferation at the department of state from 2018 until 2020 and he served as special assistant to the president and senior director for weapons of mass destruction and counter proliferation at the national security council chris has worked at the hudson institute has served on the student committee on appropriations and the senate committee on banking housing and urban affairs so also a very robust background sorry trying to adjust my screen here and third we will have rose got miller who is the pain distinguished lecturer at the center for international security and cooperation at stanford university before joining stanford rose was the deputy secretary general of nato from 2016 to 2019 where she helped to drive forward nato's adaptation to new security challenges in europe and in the fight against terrorism she served as the under secretary for arms control and international security at the u.s department of state advising the secretary of state under arms control non-proliferation and political military affairs while assistant secretary of state for arms control verification and compliance for 2009 and 2010 she was the chief negotiator of the new strategic arms treaty new start with the russian federation prior to her government service she was a senior associate with the carnegie endowment for international peace with joint appointments to the non-proliferation uh and russian programs so such an illustrious group thrilled to have all three of you with us today and with that i will turn first to lynn for her introductory remarks um thanks so much excuse me thank you so much rebecca for having me and it's really an honor to be on a panel with chris and rose i look forward to our discussion later as well as questions and discussion with the audience um so you asked us to what our pitch would be to the to the president on this um and i would i would frame it in terms of how important it is for the president to place priority on reducing nuclear risks in my view it ranks right up there i mean he's got a lot on his plate domestically and internationally but it really ranks up there along with addressing climate change obviously dealing with the current pandemic and bio threats into the future that nuclear risks really requires his focus for for humanity and and and just to to put his stamp on on u.s policy i think leadership u.s leadership area is in is essential um with due respect to chris i think the u.s um has not led as well as it could um in recent years across the range of non-proliferation and nuclear risks and there's an opportunity here to do more one thing i would say to the president is there are some things that you are within your own authority to do one of them you already did which was to make the decision to extend new start there are other things you can do including as a matter of your own policy establishing procedures that put some guard rails around you know your authority to use nuclear weapons by saying that you will put in in place a system where you consult key members of your of your cabinet and perhaps even as circumstances permitting congressional leadership before you would take such a momentous decision he can also direct a fail-safe review at the department of defense to really drill down and red team and look closely at whether our systems are are really as secure as they could be against cyber risks other threats that could lead to an inadvertent or um unauthorized use um echoing something that was done 30 years ago when secretary cheney was was secretary of defense in a different era but but similar ideas and then getting to your construct of the trilemma there are the things um that are harder and and take longer because it involves working closely with allies negotiating dialogue with competitors and adversaries and of course having some congressional support for those actions so turning briefly to the npr i would say that reducing the role of nuclear weapons in national security policy should remain a guiding principle and of course encouraging other countries to do the same is important um on declaratory policy that should mean um reducing not expanding the circumstances under which we would contemplate use i think this president for the first time probably is going to be faced with a very fundamental question which is whether and to what extent china's modernization should affect our assessment of current requirements in terms of numbers and types of weapons i would advise the president to drill down very carefully and possibly with some skepticism on on that undoubtedly debate in terms of how when and to what extent it should affect our requirements and he should look of course at you know do we need all the capabilities that are currently in train um and i guess i won't get into specific weapon systems now but slickman comes to mind as well as the b83 um and then finally i know you had a panel on on arms control so i'll just say briefly i would say to the president you know it's important to think about where do you want to be at the end of the first term in terms of our nuclear relationship with russia and then with china and i would say where we don't want to be i think is a year away from new start expiring with no successor in sight and in a in an outright nuclear arms race with china and so there are you know things that can be done on both of those issues to make sure that that's not where we end up all in the interest of time i can save that for for q a and again i know you had a panel earlier on those issues and i'll just conclude by saying that you know making progress on in these areas a requires the focus and priority of the president it obviously requires as as your conference is is discussing over the last two days um more um continuity across administrations republican democrat in terms of our approaches you know better more more um i guess collaboration or coordination between executive and legislative branches uh and of course close consultation with allies but i actually think one of the strongest things we could do in terms of reassuring allies is having more of a consensus approach and more continuity in our policies so that we don't you know swing wildly from from one administration to the next and with that i will turn it back to rebecca thank you so much lynn very helpful good uh good comments to get the ball rolling here with that let me turn over to christopher ford and uh here how would you advise the president uh thanks rebecca i hope you can hear me um it's great to be by the way on a panel with such high-powered new fellow panelists and i'm happy to try to offer some thoughts although of course i have to make clear that these are only my own my own thoughts and they don't necessarily represent those anybody else maybe anywhere and certainly not at the mitre corporation um so about the nuclear trilate i guess if as i see it if trilemmas are related to dilemmas uh in being situations in which you're sort of caught between competing interests that work to some extent to cross purposes i'm not sure we actually have that much of a problem as the question has been framed as i see it nuclear modernization arms control revitalizing alliances and nuclear role reduction do not all of them work at cross purposes and in fact all but one of them i would argue are actually very complementary especially in the current security environment the final one perhaps a bit more problematic and i'll talk about that in a minute it may present something of a dilemma but on the whole i think the answer for us policy uh is pretty straightforward and you know if uh in the improbable chance i would give the president the president's ear for a moment that would be the advice that i would give but let me try to explain that um modernization just to start with that i would argue is not just consistent with but actually essential uh both to successful arms control and to our alliance relationships i don't mean to be cute but if we hope to bargain with other possessors over restraints or upon or reductions in nuclear weaponry we need to have something to bargain with and since our current systems are already at the outside edge of their service life at least this necessarily means modernizing our arsenal so that they don't simply age out uh were we not to modernize there would be very little frankly uh any little reason for our adversaries to consider arms control with us why would they want to in fact pay us to cap or eliminate something that will shortly fall apart uh on its own so i would say if we want to negotiate a new arms control framework we need to make sure that we possess things that our adversaries wish to limit and that they have reason to think that long-term competition without such limits is not in their interest so from that perspective i think it would be quite foolish for us leaders to do the work of russian or chinese arms control negotiators for them by abandoning u.s programs or allowing our systems to decay in place without getting anything for that in return so making sure that the us deterrent remains effective safe and reliable for as long as we might continue to need it is of course vital to our own deterrence but it's also worth pointing out that it is needed too for the security of the allies to shelter under our nuclear umbrella so modernization is critical to strong alliance relationships as well especially in an era in which russian and chinese regional revisionism is both increasingly aggressive and increasingly well armed and in which our conventional military power is increasingly challenged by their advances especially in some regional scenarios so i think that one of the surest ways to undermine our alliances would be to cut back upon or to end the modernization effort upon which defends the future viability of our arsenal and thus also of the nuclear umbrella upon which our allies rely so modernization arms control and alliances i would say go together rather well they actually reinforce each other if there is a skunk at the strategic analytical garden party of what this conference is calling the trilemma it may however be role reduction now a good deal of role reduction certainly did seem possible for a long while and i supported it when serving in the george w bush administration when we emphasized doing exactly that and 20 years ago when the strategic environment was still felt to be fundamentally non-competitive the us enjoyed massive conventional superiority over any adversary in any theater and our great power counterparts were either not increasing their nuclear capacities much or were joining us in reductions at that time such role reduction seemed quite possible for the us but we shouldn't delude ourselves today one might wish it to be otherwise of course but none of those conditions is actually the case anymore the security environment has been deteriorating we and our allies face growing conventional threats that are the most significant that we've seen in decades and which threaten our own forces with potential overmatch in some regional contexts moscow and beijing are also both building up their nuclear capacities and of course in china's case with really quite shocking speed and they are both also aggressively developing non-nuclear capabilities with potential strategic impact as well raising all sorts of thorny cross-domain issues so today we seem to have more need of deterrence against great power adversaries than at any point since the end of the cold war and things are getting worse so i guess the question would be where does that deterrence come from if we reduce the role of nuclear weapons and u.s planning even further and where even could it come from if we are not willing to invest in increased non-nuclear capabilities to make up that difference even assuming that money were available for such things in the wake of washington's current domestic spending spree and death burdens and even assuming that significant conventional substitution for nuclear weaponry were possible in the first place and those are big assumptions they require i would say evidence rather than assertion so how is this supposed to work if we were to avoid having less effective deterrence in a worsening security environment i should also add that it's not entirely clear that the reductions that have occurred in the role of nuclear weapons in the united states have actually helped make such weapons less relevant for others if anything our conventional military capabilities in the post-cold war era may have made nuclear weapons seem more important to moscow than to beijing now let me be clear here i i don't see russian and chinese motives in the modern era as being defensive they are clearly revisionist and hence inherently aggressive in their strategic outlook but that doesn't make role reduction any easier far from it and it's hard to escape the suspicion that the more high-end conventional capabilities that we might pursue in an effort to replace nuclear deterrence as it were the more that others may feel they need more such nuclear deterrence themselves and this could undermine the prospects for arms control agreements for while our own nuclear role reduction would presumably make us more likely to be comfortable with limits or with cuts it's likely to make others less so in the same degree so it's not clear to me how that circle gets squared and u.s nuclear role reduction could also undermine america's alliance relationships unless and until we can provide a non-nuclear answer to the worsening strategic and deterrence generally challenges that we and our allies face role reduction is likely to undermine our alliance relationships especially coming at a time when these alliance partners need such reassurance more than they have in many years due to escalating threats so for my part i'd like to keep the nuclear tools and the posture that's needed to reassure those allies and also to persuade them that they don't need such things themselves so there's a non-proliferation piece there as well so where does that leave us i think the idea of role reduction may actually create something of a dilemma therefore but i don't think the resolution of these challenges is that difficult we can have modernization arms control and robust alliances together and thus also continue the bipartisan consensus on this in washington that has existed for the last decade and perhaps more but if antinuclear zeal compels us also to try to swing back into the role reduction mode in the current security environment i fear we would risk throwing that away thus potentially imperiling deterrence itself undermining our alliance relationships and making arms control agreements less likely rather than more so thanks you chris i really appreciate those comments a lot there i think for us to discuss when we get to the questions but uh let me next turn to rose god miller sorry madam president i needed to unmute apologies president hersmann uh i actually understand man that you've just had a lot of discussion of arms control matters but i wanted to take exception with the for instance that was laid out in describing the nuclear trilemma prioritizing certain types of arms control and i quote could undermine u.s nuclear modernization and strain u.s extended deterrence commitments in this ma'am uh it's remarkable how alike mr ford and i are although i also must say that i agree a lot uh with what miss ruston had to say but to get back to my concern with uh describing um a kind of contradiction here sound arms control policy should never be developed in a way that would undermine kiev's key u.s national security objectives instead it should support those objectives at the negotiating table arms control should facilitate u.s nuclear modernization by creating maximum predictability about what the other party or parties are up to with their strategic nuclear forces in that way clear modernization requirements can be set on our side which helps in our increasingly tight fiscal environment in some cases arms control has been used to get rid of certain weapon classes such as intermediate-range ground launch missiles which were banned for over 30 years until the russians violated the inf treaty thus sometimes it can provide for direct cost savings but we must always keep an alert eye on what the other side is doing of course if cheating on breakout occur we must act as we did in the case of inf likewise arms control should never strain u.s extended deterrence commitments in my experience allies have welcomed arms control as a way to ameliorate tensions with potential adversaries they get nervous when there is no arms control effort underway or when it is unproductive the biggest difficulty that arms control has posed for allies especially in europe uh is in the interplay with their publics thus during the period running up to the inf negotiations allied governments in nato had to contend with large public demonstrations against deployment of u.s pershing 2 and glicka missiles in europe this experience colored their behavior for many years afterwards with constant efforts in nato europe to keep nuclear weapons and nuclear policy out of the public eye and off of the public political agenda in this environment it was quite difficult to pursue arms control activities involving the nato allies although as i think you probably heard from jessica cox in her remarks earlier now the allies are very seized of these issues and very engaged on them so i do believe that the situation has changed at the present time and that represents an opportunity for the united states to work more closely with our allies on this agenda however and here as it may surprise you i agree with mr ford but for different reasons nuclear declaratory policy is another matter i do not equate it with arms control it is indeed part of the larger discussion pursuing policies such as no first use or in the recent period sole purpose have generated ally uh anxiety among the allies in asia as well as in europe for that reason i have tended to place less emphasis on changing u.s declaratory policy i i would rather spend political capital on ensuring that the program of record for the u.s nuclear modernization is on a sound funding basis we need to ensure that the u.s nuclear arsenal remains safe secure and effective into this century our budget priorities need to reflect this goal and do so on a consistent and persistent basis bipartisan basis a final point a revitalized arms control leg is inherent to ensuring that our integrated deterrent stool stays upright that revitalization will take us in new directions beyond the control and limitation of hardware items but we have new opportunities to use technology to help us to succeed to help us to be creative i'm particularly encouraged that the advent of more ubiquitous sensing technologies will help us to do monitoring and verification better than we have been able to do in the past and will open the door to monitoring and verification of nuclear warheads i am happy to take this topic up further in our discussion ma'am but with that i will turn it back to you thank you rose and thank you for the promotion uh i appreciate it um so i think um there's several interesting questions i would like to tease out first let me just give a little bit of guidance to uh our audience i'm going to encourage you all to start putting your questions into the q a format that's the best place that i'll be able to see it not the chat i will i think i failed to do this earlier remind you that this discussion is on the record and is being recorded so you will have a chance to review it uh some days hence and you'll get a notice when it has been posted to the csis website um but as you are accumulating some of your questions here i'm going to ask a few and then i'm going to give our panelists a chance to ask each other a few questions um so first i would like to ask the group and touch on sort of three areas the first one is let's drill in a little bit on the issue of dilemmas maybe not trilemmas but dilemmas in any case specifically in the area of alliances and nuclear policy we have certainly had kind of a flurry of news you might say in this area with the announcement of the august agreement various decisions about the transfer of nuclear propulsion technology um but also in the tensions between sets of alliances and alliance partners um between the asia theater and that in europe um and uh clearly a bit of fence mending to be done with our french ally all of that in mind i'd really like your take um quickly if i could ask all three of you how do you see this playing out in sort of the relative pro con of managing our strategic challenges and our nuclear policy writ large if you don't mind i'll start in the opposite order we just went so rose i'll turn to you first well thanks very much rebecca i have been thinking about this issue a lot in recent days some of you may have seen the letter i put in the new york times it was published in the print version today i believe that this is a brilliant stroke there's no question about it we need to develop uh and strengthen our alliance relationships in the asia pacific in the indo-pacific what concerns me is how we have gone about it it has simultaneously enraged france one of our key allies in nato europe and also blown apart 60 years of u.s policy to minimize the use of highly enriched uranium so i think we need to uh look at this deal and think about it as uh fabricating a three-corner billiard shot we need to put together uh a discussion over the next 18 months as they are going to be studying the matter where the opportunity to bring a low enriched uranium propulsion into the picture is considered front and center very strongly and to my mind that involves bringing france into the conversation i would like to see that happen in order to be able to both develop this deal in a reasonable way from the perspective of getting australia the submarines it needs but also preserving our alliance relationships in europe after all nato is our rear guard against russia we cannot afford to turn our back on europe so continue to develop and strengthen our alliance relationships not only in asia but also in europe and then finally to preserve and continue to strengthen the nonproliferation regime thank you thank you rose chris what's your take on this issue well i've been publicly very supportive um of of the august deal it uh uh you know it's as i think i said the other day to somebody it's never you know a great thing to have disagreements with an important old friend and ally like france but on the you know on strategic balance i think the officer arrangement is absolutely essential and a huge step forward it's a it's a very profound statement um uh about regional geopolitics that is very important to hear it's a good message for other allies in the region it is an important qualitative step forward in terms of concrete military capabilities for the ssbns the nuclear-powered fast attacks will provide a very very different and far more important and and uh hopefully deterring capacity in the region with the legs that they can provide i think it's a it's a tremendous move there you know one has to be mindful of the non-proliferation implications and i would stress that we don't exactly know how this is going to be implemented yet uh current u.s boats for example have lifetime of i believe have lifetime of unit fueling so there there does not necessarily even have to be a question of heu transfer uh assuming it's even heu and i take rose's point about considering leu i i'm not enough of an engineer to assess whether leu really has the requisite power density but uh that's for you know that's for smarter folks than i took to figure out but i do think um there is a non-proliferation sensible way forward here and the strategic benefits are quite considerable so i'm quite quite pro thank you thank you lynne weston um thanks rebecca i i agree with everything that um rose said and we'll add that you know i'm not sure that all the non-proliferation factors have really been thought through in this i mean it is an incredible um you know precedent that's now being set in terms of we've never you know transferred or shared this technology with a non-nuclear weapon state and although australia of course has a stellar reputation um in terms of its non-proliferation record and as you know promised that it wouldn't committed that it wouldn't um develop nuclear weapons we have to be mindful of the precedent for others who would either develop their technology on their own um or other nuclear countries that would you know go the same path and share and so that requires um i i do agree with rose i think a serious look at lu which the which the french used to power their naval vessels would be wise um but also there has to be incredibly strict um you know safeguards developed this has never been done before with iaea in terms of what is the safeguard regime for this material you know you know before it is uh introduced into naval vessels and then one it once it comes out um and that should be done with the strictest standards that keep in mind that what's good for the goose is good for the gander and um you know whatever whatever is uh developed for this deal should it go forward you know will be applicable to other countries that may not have the stellar non-proliferation record that australia does and also just to put it in a more graphic way we're talking about the the sharing or transfer of enough nuclear material to make something like 160 bombs i mean it's a lot of material over time given eight subs or whatever it is um and um you know that's jones said i'm sorry as rose said in terms of atu minimization that's you know that's more material than we've spent over the last decade decades you know repatriating hgu from around the world so they're really serious considerations that i wonder if they got as much consideration as they should have before the decision was announced all right thank you a lot there to discuss i suspect it will come up again as we continue and i'm keeping an eye on the questions as they come in you know i'd like to follow up with sort of a two-parter for each of you um and i want to pick up on something that chris said about role reduction because i think you you know you're you've uh you've decoded some of the trilemma i think in in a way that we were not uh unaware of which is some of what creates that trilemma pressure is your overall perspective on nuclear weapons and whether or not um we need some explicit pressures on it to actually redo reduce the role of nuclear weapons in u.s national security policy and strategy so i mean the first part of my question will be to ask each of you um but especially for sort of lyndon rose what is your take on that you've both alluded to that um but there is this tension and how do you see that playing out from the perspective of role reduction and relatedly then um how do you think about this in the context of a couple of other specific policy areas number one um disarmament as opposed to arms control or as part of arms control but the issue of actual reductions and in particular the role if any for unilateral reductions is there a role for that is that an appropriate policy for the united states at this time or do you sort of oppose the notion of unilateral reductions that are not done in the context of an arms control agreement would be number one number two do you explicitly favor or oppose a narrowing of declaratory policy to reduce the role of nuclear weapons um whether that were to take the form of a no first use or a sole purpose declaration which is usually considered more of a posture rather than a declaratory policy but regardless do you have a position on that or do you think declaratory policy should remain unchanged um and then the third one is a tricky one that has to do with the relationship between our conventional and nuclear capabilities again alluded to here to what extent do you see it as part of our overall nuclear policy to seek to replace strategic nuclear capabilities with uh conventional capabilities such as long-range strike do you think there should be an interaction do you think those are appropriate capabilities to develop or do you see those as more problematic i've put a lot on your plate but i guess i'm asking for a general you know view um succinctly put on role reduction and then your specific views on each one of those three specific topics why don't i reverse the order again if you don't mind and that lin i'll go to you first this time and then follow the order of the agenda okay um let's see that was a lot there um returning to some of chris's comments there are a lot of kind of embedded assumptions to unpack and some of the things he said but i guess one of the things i'll pull out that i i do disagree with is he equated as i understood it reducing the role of nuclear weapons and national security policy as resulting in less effective deterrence and you know i i don't i don't agree with that um you know i think the whole discussion is about what is deterrence you know how much is enough um what deters what are we deterring and these are kind of the age-old questions but what i don't think is in the u.s interest is lowering the threshold for use either through our our policies or declaratory policy or planning or other countries doing the same and so i think it's important to not legitimize the use of nuclear weapons in response to non-nuclear threats so i'll start with that in terms of um let's see you asked about unilateral reductions um i think you know basically the premise should be you know a country our country we should assess what we need how much is enough you know what we're prepared to do in modernization um and then execute that policy um you know i think the fact is the reality is um there's not support in this kind of environment to do any significant unilateral reductions i did think um nti has certainly proposed the idea that the u.s and russia together as a political commitment could come to the mpt review conference with a with a modest commitment under the new start ceilings to go down a little lower i think that's something frankly like to 1400 i think that's something that the united states could you know could do on its own it would be better to do with russia but that's you know that's not a significant um unilateral reduction and it would be reversible of course in terms of the relationship between conventional and nuclear capability i think i also disagree with what i think i heard chris say is that um developing conventional high-end conventional capabilities could actually um promote you know more nuclear responses on on the russia side and therefore we shouldn't go that route i mean i i do think um the best way to reassure allies is to have you know forces that we would actually use to defend them and i think again i think that you know nuclear weapons are primarily to deter the use of nuclear weapons and i think once you get into a conflict where a nuclear weapon has been used by either side you know you've it's it's over and you don't know where that will go and the political objective you are trying to achieve is is probably not going to be achievable and so i think it's we're all back to the age-old questions of what deters and how much is enough did you lynn just do it before we leave it did you have a view on um whether or not you would strongly recommend a change to us declaratory policy to narrow its role well the answer is yeah i mean i think first of all i would i would um you know go start with um where where the obama administration declaratory policy was and not not expand the role as it was done um under the trump administration for instance implicitly threatening it against cyber and other things but also i do think we should be as the president has said he wanted to working toward sole purpose i think that's something you do have to do carefully with the allies and understanding what it means and reassuring in terms of the conventional capability you bring to bear um but i do think it's it's the direction we should be going all right great thank you chris over to you sure well just to be clear i did not argue against pursuing high-end conventional capabilities as you probably are not shocked to hear um my point was merely that we need to be honest with ourselves about the trade-offs that they can create in the minds of those whose behavior such as coming to the arms control table uh we are trying to influence and i think we've maybe not paid nearly enough attention to that but i think there are real trade-offs that we ignore at our peril um in terms of the relationship between role reduction and our security my my logic was pretty straightforward in the sense that at a time when threats are increasing um anyone who proposes to reduce our reliance upon any element not just the nuclear piece but any element of the ways in which we have tried to deter those threats hitherto uh needs to happen be able to provide an answer as to where that delta of deterrence is going to come from if we cut back on the world nuclear weapons i haven't heard a credible case in that respect nor are the people who want us to reduce the role of nuclear weapons customarily in the business of supporting building up the kind of capabilities you might imagine filling that gap if there were a gap to be filled so i haven't i've heard i've not heard a coherent case for how it does anything but reduce our security i'm certainly open to it but i just haven't heard it yet um on the more positive side i would point out that the role reduction is not the same thing as risk reduction but i think you can probably have the latter uh without having the former and that is probably where we should be spending our time and effort um on unilateral reductions i'm not going to surprise anybody on this circuit by saying that no not in favor of that um uh i also would oppose narrowing our declaratory policy uh again not a shocker there but in a time in which the cross-domain challenges that help give rise to the bw caveat in the 2010 npr and that helped give rise to the significant non-nuclear strategic attack caveat in the 2018 npr those challenges are not getting better they're worsening um in rather dramatic ways so unless we you know if you want to narrow our declaratory policy again you need to be able to provide a coherent answer to how you meet those challenges in some other way i fully admit that nuclear is not a particularly good way to meet those challenges um but that should be a call you know for an agenda to figure out ways to do so um but not just to wave away uh the fact that there are relationships here um sole purpose i think it is it would be a grave mistake it never has been true and i don't see a path to it being true and pretending that it's true strikes me as a strategic mistake that could create very grave problems for us and no first use again i'm not going to shock anybody no first use i think is uh at the moment in for a long time and probably for a long time still undesirable from a u.s perspective and not credible from anybody in anybody's mouth i just think it is a it is a type of claim that amounts more to performative virtue of signaling than strategic policy where you can rely upon such a pledge you don't need it in the first place and where you really would need it if you could believe it you can't believe it anyway so it strikes me as a waste of time and a conceptual dead data over okay thank you i'm not to pulling punches sorry can usually count on you to be straightforward chris um rose over to you wow well maybe i'll start with declaratory uh policy just to say as i did in my remarks that of course it would be very good to move in the direction of uh narrowing the role but my view is that the game isn't worth the candle at this point because we need to keep our eye on the prize of ensuring that our nuclear modernization is adequately funded and we shouldn't be burning up capital on debates over um sole purpose in this case or no first use i know that that view is is not particularly popular in a number of circles where i operate but but i take a rather pragmatic view of this at this moment and um having the scars of a couple npr processes to show for it i do not agree with the approach that was taken however with the somewhat more expansive view of this matter uh in the 2018 npr because i think it's too tenuous our understanding these days of what deters in hybrid space what deters in terms of uh cyber attacks and that type of thing and until we understand a whole lot more about what exactly determines beans with regard to uh to cyber attacks for example then we need to be very very cautious about how we throw around our declaratory policy so to say um in threatening nuclear response so that's my again very pragmatic view on on that matter we need to do more homework uh before we go down that road you asked the question about unilateral reductions i really believe that unilateral reductions are a tool but they must be taken in parallel i generally do not believe in the united states taking a unilateral step without the other side whether it's russia or china taking some kind of parallel step also i think it i look upon it now as a tool that can help us perhaps to jump start some progress at the negotiating table that's why i too support the notion of the united states and russia perhaps coming to the npt review conference with uh a lower number we're already if you look at the new start data exchanges we're already below the level of deployed warheads and delivery vehicles uh allowed in new start so why not simply absorb those uh those as parallel unilateral reductions and and take it to the npt conference as a way a modest step forward but one that jumpstarts further uh nuclear negotiations and finally uh chris i'm i'm going to take up uh rebecca's invitation and lynn also raised this but i want to come back at you on this notion of our buildup of conventional weapons has encouraged russia and china to embrace more nuclear capability more nuclear deterrence i when i think about this whole question i think about the display of missile might that the russians have put on in the syria conflict over the last couple of years where they saw the enormous capability of our missiles to our conventional missiles to undertake massive strikes across a ra a wide range of regional targets uh in a more limited conflict and they said i want that and they went for it and they displayed it in spades throughout their engagement in syria over the last few years including launching missiles out of the caspian sea to to towards syria you know this was more display than military really military capability but they showed that they could do it so in my mind they've they've been chasing us to acquire some of those same wide-ranging and it's not rebecca to your question it's not at the strategic level it's across other uh ranges up to the intermediate uh range as we saw of course with the creation of the 9m729 and the violation of of the inf treaty so that's the way i think about it they they want that kind of conventional prowess that we have in in the missile uh world and and so that's why i wanted to throw it back at you and say uh what exactly are you talking about all right thank you if i might rebecca i'm certainly not arguing that they're not chasing that capability they absolutely are um and and i i don't see what that actually has to do with the supposed trade-off between conventional and nuclear at the high end i think they absolutely want those capacities for reasons that don't have a lot to do with strategic competitions certainly my point was merely that you know certainly they claim and some of this may be true and i think we need to take seriously at least the possibility that some of it is true they claim at least that our high-end conventional capabilities uh they say it presents a threat to them that they use to justify their their nuclear posture now you can discount some of that i do think you know a fair proportion of that falls into the category of excuse rather than reason um but but i think if we just pretend that there's no potential feedback there at all we're probably missing something too so my urging was to be careful about those feedback loops because we really haven't spent much time thinking about them yet thank you um i'm we are starting to get a good number of questions uh in the q a if i could ask you to keep those coming i'm looking through them and looking for the best way to link some of those together so please feel free to send those along um just before i turn to that i'll just check and see if any of you have enough any other questions you wish you had the opportunity to ask each other you want to think about it for a minute and all right um let me know uh just give me give me a wave and we'll do that but what i would like to do now is i'm going to tweak this question a bit because we've been discussing this topic but from uh patty jane geller we have a question for rose if as you say we should continue our modernization program and avoid changing declaratory policy what options remain for reducing the role of nuclear weapons if any or do we have to move away from that language altogether um i think you you highlighted one i think in this discussion of could you do some sort of bilateral um voluntary reduction but in practical terms how do we square up the pressures on the logical places to secure some reduction in role with the role reduction language that we we are hearing and i suspect will be somewhat difficult to let go of um i'll start with you rose and then if uh lynn and chris want to chime in on this question just uh kind of wave at me and i'll be happy to pull you in okay well we've been clear and it's also clear in nato uh declaratory policy that uh primary role of nuclear weapons is to deter other nuclear weapons and that the chances of nuclear use are extremely remote from the perspective of of the united states and and its nato allies so i think we are already clearly on record as uh not expressing any preference uh for moving back toward nuclear warfighting and how we think about nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence now so the question is is there anything else that should be done in the declaratory space at this moment my view is at this moment the answer to that is no but it's an open question it's open to debate in the meantime what i would prefer to see is a robust development of our agenda for strategic stability dialogue with both russia and china and there will be another meeting of the strategic stability dialogue with russia on the 30th of september that's great but we need to be developing a robust agenda there and as lin said earlier we need to get back to the negotiating table thinking seriously about how to replace new start if we put the goal out there as we all have on both sides of the aisle in the united states republican and democrat that we want to place direct limits on non-strategic nuclear warheads in the russian arsenal then we have to think very seriously about what we're going to be willing to give to get that goal if we also want to get a limitation on these so-called new exotic delivery systems that the russians have developed we need to be thinking seriously about what we're willing to give to get that goal so there's a lot of really hard work that has to be done and uh to my mind it makes better sense for our interagency and for our two political parties to be trying to focus together on on how we get that robust agenda moving thank you um chris or lynn do you have anything you want to chime in on that topic kind of covered that one all right um peter husey has a question that i'm going to sort of expand on just a little bit because i think he opens uh a jar we have yet to tap into which is how do we actually want to think about china and russia and to what extent do we think about them in more independent bilateral context versus do we need to think about uh all of these issues in a more trilateral way or do we even need to go so far to contemplate um thinking about china and russia as forming some form of of either loose cooperation to more formal um kind of alliance uh his particular question is how do we deter china and russia from using nuclear force against the us or its allies if china and russia come kind of combine efforts um and are cooperating in in some form of aggression so this has really been a big topic including out of the stratcom commander and others about do we need to think in some combined way in this tri-polar nuclear environment as uh particularly china speeds uh to a much more advanced capability or do we sort of keep everything separate and apart um which one of you might want to tackle that or tackle that first go ahead lin i'll i'll start um i think from the perspective first of the kind of risk reduction arms control um perspective that for the for the near term it really has to be on two different tracks and this was a point i was making earlier in terms of um you know i would hate to see us be in a position where we suddenly didn't feel like we could continue limitations and hopefully even some reductions with russia and address this expanded categories of weapons that need to be included probably not at one agreement but some set of agreements that we suddenly can't make progress on that agenda because of our concerns about china i think it's really important to keep the russia track going and frankly realistically we will ultimately get china into an arms control negotiation only when we come down lower i think on the china track you know obviously this you know we need to mature the the nuclear relationship with china where we can begin to talk about the i mean we've tried but we get you know a more sophisticated dialogue with them where they participate in terms of what their intentions and plans are you know strategic stability in the region um there's probably lower hanging fruit that can be pursued now like ballistic missile launch notification agreement but something like you know real arms control limitations um is down the road and it seems to me that we in the us government probably have a lot of homework to do to really think hard about what it is we want from china and what's negotiable what we're prepared to give in a regional construct um and also we're gonna have to grapple with hard questions like you know do we accept mutual nuclear vulnerability we we probably actually are in that state but have never said it and are we prepared to accept you know parity or rougher parity as we go lower if we want to um engage russia in in a nuclear arms control arrangement so i think there's a lot of work ahead but i don't see that a trilateral approach on some of these core issues will be productive at this stage chris do you have thoughts on this question i'm sure i mean i would agree with lynn to the extent that i think it's pretty it's pretty clear that at least initially the any negotiating approach or or talks on these topics uh with moscow and or beijing presumably has to be sort of multiply bilateral you know parallel bilateral tracks um the odds of getting folks together at the same table in the near future don't seem very high although that would be great um so while the problem may need to be approached in a sort of parallel bilateralism there's no getting around the fact that the underlying problem is trilateral at the very least maybe more but let's let's focus on the trilateral piece um and and it does matter and we can't pretend that all things are you know what we think of as the strategic normal in our negotiating with russia when china is on this kind of a trajectory there are clearly going to be some limits on what we could imagine ourselves being willing to agree to with the russians or indeed they too agree with us and let's not forget that russia and china are to suddenly be racing as really the only two of the three that are building up right now to some degree they're racing against each other um you know i don't think it's entirely coincidental that uh that the russians are building too many non-strap weapons uh i think partly that's you know aimed at our friends in nato but i would not ignore the sino-russian frontier there either so the problem is structurally trilateral and and you can't get around that um i think maybe in the long term we have less to worry about in the sense of ganging up on the united states because yeah i think it's pretty clear from a historical perspective it's sooner or later especially as china continues on its trajectory and frankly russia continues on its own of demographic decline and economic corruption and incompetence uh you know the wheels will fall off their strategically cooperative bus but in the near term that could be you know that's not tomorrow and in the near term there could be all sorts of trouble um that that comes from the possibility of us having to be worried about both of them simultaneously especially as they end up both being more or less nuclear peers in the not too far distant future bismarck i think in the 19th century referred to the nightmare of coalition so the nightmare of combinations or something like that and looking at central european geopolitics at the time our strategic planners are starting to have a problem that they have never had before and we don't quite know what the answer is to that problem and we should not pretend that it is anything other than a really major new and qualitative shift that is very concerning thank you rose i just want to add uh one thing that has concerned me about this i agree with with chris i you know the notion of them both ganging up on uh the united states in some kind of strategy strategically uh coherent and reliable way i think that's a bit far-fetched but what i am worried about and it affects our nato allies in europe is if we are uh we are confronting china in some crisis uh in the indo-pacific that russia will opportunistically decide to create some mischief in europe those are the kinds of uh opportunistic scenarios that that worry me at the moment and i think uh we need to be thinking carefully certainly the nato allies need to be ready for that uh it gets back to the whole question of strategic autonomy of course we are not talking about that in this particular conference but if the united states is preoccupied in the indo-pacific and russia decides to cause mischief on europe's borders then what will nato be ready to do about it and so again that's something we need to keep our attention on we need to keep our eye on that uh that security problem as well indeed thank you for that um you know we have a question from uh similar questions or related questions from greg giles and heather williams that i will kind of combine into a question of what can the united states bring to the table in the upcoming review conference in practical terms i'll set aside for a moment the suggestion of the the bilateral you know reduction night that both you and and lynn have referred to um uh you can comment whether you think it's realistic in the next you know couple of months i don't know but aside from that is there anything because most of what we've described sort of starts taking those um you know those uh things that you might think be might be reassuring to the more disarmament oriented communities that it doesn't sound like we're going to have too much to offer are we missing anything in this discussion is there anything we could offer um to on the issue of disarmament or or other things to help that very important forum uh be successful and uh similarly to kind of make sure that it remains the preeminent forum for thinking about broader non-proliferation and that we can kind of hold at bay questions about the prominence of uh the ban treaty and its uh related architecture um so with that is which would one of you like to go first uh lynn i saw your hand sure i'll take a stab and first of all just to clarify but not dwell on the you know parallel reduction thing i think the way to do it is you bring that commitment to the mpt revcon and you promised to implement it by six months or twelve months ahead so that you know it happens naturally and you know it doesn't cost a lot of money in terms of if you're going to do any offloading of subs or something like that but that would be the idea um there'll be a commitment to be implemented at some reasonable time frame um i think obviously with the non-nuclear weapons states they're looking for our strong commitments um of the nuclear weapon states toward the you know just the reductions and disarmament process and so obviously something like that from the united states and russia plus you know commitment about what they plan to do over the next few years is really important um something in the p5 context would be helpful i mean there's a lot of interest in things like risk reduction measures um doctrine and more more kind of interplay between non-nuclear weapons and weapons states in terms of talking about documents talking about risk reduction i do think some tone down rhetoric on the tpnw would be welcome you're going to have to find a way to acknowledge its entry into force and probably and hopefully be less um be less um pejorative about the motives of those states um that have joined on without you know anyway there's there's just a balance there um but i i don't think anybody wants that to be the spoiler at the at the conference including tpnw proponents we'll see um i don't know see what others have to contribute i do think the australia deal is a as a complication um in terms of peaceful uses um so bringing commitments about implementing that in the most proliferation non-proliferation sensitive way possible i guess it'll be part of the conversation all right thank you yeah i i agree with that actually that it's going to be very uh important to carefully scope when we heard about the deal last week for the first time there was a lot of we're going to be studying the problem we're going to be studying the problem we're going to be studying the problem well that's fine but there now needs to be a set of talking points about how the problem will be studied and as i said showing that uh sensitivity to uh the non-proliferation objectives the necessity of of looking seriously at uh low enriched uranium cores for the new submarines these will i think all be beneficial messages uh for the npt review conference the other thing i just want to raise a doubt about though lynn given the way the united states and uk together with australia have enraged paris at the moment is i'm really wondering if the p5 will be able to do anything coherent for the npt review conference i hope that they will be able to do so in particular since the united states and russia were able to repeat the reagan gorbachev statement during their bilateral summit back in june it would be nice if the p5 could now make that statement uh in the rev-com environment that would i think be a good step uh to take but uh we'll have to see how long the white heat of french anger uh remains and uh how long it's going to take to get back to to work in in the p5 per se i note that heather williams was asking you chris about the scent program and what you would uh predict could be the com contribution of send i'd be really interested what you have to say about that thank you i was going to add that one as well as we turn to chris thank you rose um well i'd love to see more um well more visibility on where that's going i mean i understand from just you know hearing my ear to the ground that uh that indeed send and heather would know this more than i at this point uh that that scent is is indeed moving forward um you know i i think there is uh i hope that there is something that can be uh made of it in the npt context not to stress that we we didn't start going down this road in order to have something nice to talk about at the npt this was not that now it may in fact be true that that's also the case and that's terrific it's a you know it's a side benefit i suppose the principal reason was that we thought it needed to be done and i hope that that logic still still remains true i mean we we need to be honest with ourselves about the heavy lift that things like npt type engagements on disarmament and arms control issues present just structurally given the way that the world is right now right i mean we have an era of arms control now that is is at least trilateral if you're talking about actually really managing risks and solving problems with a new framework going ahead it may involve more parties than that um there are more axes of relevant rivalry to be worried about in the cross-domain context today than before i mean in many respects you know you sort of see we have an inherited feel for what arms control looks like and it's sort of bilateral and it's sort of washington moscowi and where we need probably need to be in answering questions about this is a very different sort of model of which we are we don't really know much yet um it feels in some ways a little bit more like the 1920s with more multi-party engagement more axes of rivalry more interconnection between parties and a broader range of stuff that you're talking about that's a very challenging sort of agenda especially if you're trying to shift simply from limitations to reductions at the same time you've got shades of maybe pale reflections but perhaps growing reflections of the 1930s in the sense that there are at least some participants in this multilateral stu who don't seem to be particularly interested in strategic restraint at all indeed their strategic vision seems to be one of revisionist self-aggrandizement um that feels a little bit more like the 1930s than it does the 1920s when you have people still feeling rather chastened coming out of world war one this is a very very challenging mix to deal with anyway and it's especially challenging if you come into a forum like the nbt discussions in which most of one's comments if one is a p fiber are judged against a laundry list of agenda items that were developed well in the in the early post-cold war era in which we faced such structurally different circumstances that it's not clear that that agenda makes any sense now uh i won't say it doesn't but but we haven't done a proper um process of thinking through what does make sense now and indeed we seem in some respect almost religiously opposed to asking questions about the degree to which the inherited conventional wisdom is in fact the right answer for tomorrow sen might be able to help chew on that um and i don't know where it will go and part of the point was that it didn't have a predetermined destination for two very important reasons one is that the disarmament discourse hitherto had been in my eye at least very bad at incorporating issues of security uh into how to think about getting towards zero uh and the second thing was that it wasn't clear what the answer is to getting the world in that shape were likely to be and so you needed to engage in a really open-minded um you know honest way about how that might work in a context in which you don't have a priori you know uh clear crystalline objectives so uh it's you know probably not going to produce miraculous answers tomorrow but i do think as a type of engagement that is expressly designed to try to start chewing on these questions in some regards for the first time on any kind of a scale i think it's essential that it may continue be that it continue rather visibly and then if it is going to continue visibly for him you know for those very important reasons we might as well make what we can have it at the nbt as a side thank you thank you you know william albert has asked a couple of questions that are related to kind of organization and bureaucracy as we as we work on these issues the particular question has to do with some new reporting about how um the office of the secretary of defense might be reorganizing to look at these problems um i'm not sure that we all fully understand what that's going to look like my personal take on that is that you know having worked in those offices including the one that may inherit a lot of these responsibilities there's a constant organizational tension between span of control in other words are you giving your decision makers you know too much territory to kind of have to cover intellectual territory to cover versus having very narrow areas but tons of overlap with other people and that's the endless challenge right of like how to find the balance between nice clean lines of control that are not too big um and so i think that'll be an issue there as they consolidate some of those functions under the new um kind of assistant secretariat for space and other strategic capabilities um there could be some really important synergies there but the second part of the question and so if you're interested in that you don't have thoughts on that i would welcome it um but as we think about sort of bureaucracies the the secondary part of the question i think is perhaps more important and i'm interested you know to hear the bureaucratic ninja skills of of the three of you and your long uh you know kind of experience in government i think the bigger challenge is sometimes regardless of how you organize various functional responsibilities is the division of labor between regional experts and functional experts and how do you actually bring those components together successfully um i think the ocus arrangement is is one perfect example of one of these challenges so how do you develop something in a small enough way that it doesn't sort of leak all over the place but how do you sort of balance making sure that you're bringing regional expertise and functional expertise together in a truly effective fashion um because that strikes me as more than a little challenging at times but maybe that's just me so what's your take on that lin yeah i agree with you completely it's it's a challenge in every um agency and every administration i've served in going back to i guess bush 41. um you know a couple of observations you know my sense is um that the regional voices are very strong uh right now at all agencies um and that i i think more of the functional voices you know need to be heard so that things are issues are properly you know considered and weighed and elevated before decisions are made um but then also make an observation amongst different regions you know i think there is a long now you know history of kind of coordination cooperation and cross-fertilization between the regionals and the functionals when it comes to russia and i'm talking specifically about nuclear policy and armed and not just nuclear but commit you know arms control and um strategic stability nuclear and conventional and so those you know and they you know they may have different perspectives but they work together and they understand the issues and they understand um and it's clear where the functionals have you know kind of a leadership role i don't think any of that exists in with the with the asia functional and you know it's maybe a little better in the north korea case because there's you know a longer history of of working on denuclearization and that kind of thing but still the regionals are very dominant and i think it really doesn't exist with china um you know with those who have china and their core focus so i think that's something just like we need to mature our nuclear relationship directly with the chinese i think i think those communities in the u.s government need to mature their um their relationship and their understanding of each other's you know perspectives and responsibilities be interested in hearing what chris and rose have to say yep chris you want to go next oh okay oh sorry sure i guess um i actually thought that uh on the subject of the dod reorg question i thought brad's aunt's brad robert's answer in the previous panel was was was pretty persuasive to me there's certainly uh i think there is potential for this to to do some good by bringing um some of these like really challenging wicked problems if you will of cross-domain deterrence and interference and so forth sort of under one under one shop i think he used the phrase one-stop shopping so potential to do some good in that respect uh my caveat is that at least my instinct after at least some time in washington over the years is to be more interested in personnel and human solutions than wiring diagram solutions you can have a great wiring diagram and if you don't put the right people in it and you don't give the appropriately clear commander's intent and don't give the people involved political and institutional top cover in time and attention and so forth all those factors are much more important than what the uh seating arrangement looks like uh but um with that caveat i i don't see any i'm not a pessimist about this new york at least um but you know as with all such things you could you can succeed brilliantly or bollocks it up uh by making poor choices in terms of the commander's intent clarity attention resources and top cover that i was describing on the regional functional balance you know my background is principally at the state department uh where the regionals have traditionally been the center of gravity um that has been less of a problem uh at least in my experience in in the last few years than it traditionally is i think the the biggest and less of a problem with on china than it used to be um uh in general i don't think there's a right answer to this you know certainly you know yeah i'm sort of a functional guy i suppose my background but i don't come to these things with the reflex that therefore the functional should should rule the roost and the way that the regionals have traditionally thought that they should i think they're both intrinsically not right in the sense that their voice is an important contributing piece of the deliberative puzzle and senior leaders need to avoid defaulting one way or the other as a reflex and spend a lot more time making sure that that both the regional and the functional perspectives and of course there's going to be more than one of each but to make sure that those perspectives are part of the process and it seems possible so they can do involved in deciding and under which circumstances who gets to sort of come out on top if you have a regular answer uh in deciding those things you're probably doing it wrong over rose to you well there's not much i can add i just uh i actually agree with both lin and chris and what they had to say and the role of of personalities and relationships and clear political top cover as chris said is really really important so you can wire up the diagram however you want but if if people are not able to work together and if they don't have that clear direction from above and top cover it's not going to work the one thing i want to add is thinking about outreach to china and what might work and succeed in outreach to china that everybody's been ringing their hands about that a bit recently we do still have the p5 process as i mentioned we'll see how much the french want to play in the upcoming period interestingly enough nato also has its palm mill and mill mill dialogue with dialogues with china uh the most recent iteration of which back in june involved discussion of of arms control issues so i don't know if that platform in any way can be helpful and i'm not speaking for nato of course anymore but i just wanted to put it uh out there that that that set of venues still exists but finally uh i think we can look to recent precedence as well i am remembering uh as under secretary for arms control and international security that we did have a political military dialogue with china that met on a rather regular basis and so i'm actually hopeful that there is some look to those that president today there was also a very interesting military-to-military dialogue where uh a large number of colonels chinese colonels came to the pentagon and spent a couple of days talking they always came over to state and talked to us they were very well prepared asked very tough questions but i think there is some history there's some precedent there that we should perhaps be looking to to try to encourage in talking to the chinese maybe we can't get started again in exactly the same way but but try to to consider together the value and the problems of those precedents and whether we might begin a slow reconstruction process because we truly need to get to the table with them and i know they've been holding us at arm's length everybody's again ringing their hands about this but we need to think about what is the art of the possible at this moment and uh appeal to past president i think can sometimes make a difference thank you thank you i'll just uh i'll kind of second i think something you all have said you know organization is one thing but it is really about how the leadership drives an issue that really determines you the bureaucracy will hop too so if you've got a lot of questions coming from the secretary or the deputy secretary or even an assistant secretary the organization is going to churn and if those leaders ask a question like where is the functional on this or you know if they think of you as missing you'd be surprised right like the the bureaucratic impediments quickly diminish if they don't ask those questions the bureaucratic impediments go up so it's all about the leadership and in my opinion more than the wiring diagram i couldn't agree more um so there's sort of a controversial question in here i might guess how some of you would come out on this but i think i'm going to go ahead and ask it anyway and that has to do with whether or not um u.s extended deterrence commitments are fixed in stone especially as we look about the changing you know uh dynamic in asia you know are they who they are and and you know in asia is it uh japan and south korea and that's it or is there a circumstance in which the united states can or should contemplate the further extension of official nuclear extended deterrence commitments to anyone else but in this question the question had to do with taiwan but i would ask it in both generally speaking whether that is a fixed ring of commitment um or whether we should consider broadening it and if so where and if you think that's a remote possibility would you consider taiwan rose would you like to jump in on that do you have a thought well i was just thinking about the news reports i saw yesterday of china now threatening australia with nuclear attack uh or to target australia with nuclear weapons i'll put it that way so clearly these questions are going to uh come up i think as i understand we are already committed to uh help taiwan and its defense and so it's not a nuclear deterrence umbrella in the same way we've extended it to our asia allies and to nato europe but i do think that we are we're clearly we have to be part of the calculations that the chinese would make in thinking through what they would uh what actions they would uh undertake against against taiwan but these questions are going to be out there and they are going to be uh increasingly out there particularly as the deal with uh with australia moves forward and we'll see you know it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this quad meeting coming up where there's this effort afoot some people are calling it already the uh the asian nato i don't see it yet at this point uh but uh it'll be interesting to see how those discussions unfold in coming days and whether there is any any reflection of this particular question about the nuclear umbrella in uh the official uh the official outcome of that meeting i kind of doubt it but nevertheless it's going to be an active question chris do you have any thoughts on whether or not our extended deterrence commitments should be expanded in any way i i can talk myself into either position on that depending upon my mood i think one thing that we should be focused on either way is making sure that our extended attorney's commitments to allies mean something where they already are um i mean it's expanding them at a time in which they're under some question even with those where we have most traditionally are associated associate ourselves with that kind of a policy um you know to some degree begs the question of what does it mean in the first place i think we we're at a threshold point now where we have some some some mail to answer and making sure that it is clear to our you know uh existing umbrella allies that the umbrella is a real thing um you know we we need to to make sure that our modernization program remains on track that we don't do you know deterrence undermining unilateral things because it makes us feel good even though it scares the crap out of our allies um we need a robust and flexible declaratory policy for those under whom it implicitly falls um you know there are there are some things we some homework we've got to do to make sure that our extended deterrence means what it needs to mean uh wherever it is and i think to some degree that's conceptually antecedent even if it's not necessarily chronologically antecedent you're trying to extend it to others but you know frankly if i were in taipei i would ask what it means um and whether i can be confident that that offers the kind of reassurance that i that i might want so so i think we we do have some work to do but it may be as i say conceptually prior to um to to the idea of extension i also suspect that if we really want to deter the prc in taiwan there may be things that be more effective than simply saying that we reserve at least the possibility of a response to an invasion scenario we have a lot more i think we can do in making taiwan um indigestible to uh to the pla either in terms of an actual invasion scenario itself or in terms of you know an utterly humiliating and bloody quagmire of occupation that they should have no desire to be involved in and that might in fact raise legitimacy challenges for the ccp itself given the way that they flash themselves to this sort of teleology of national reunification i think there's probably stuff we can do in the short term that would have a more deterring effect uh against invasion scenarios than uh than a declaratory policy policy modification at this point thank you thank you so lynn just on this i guess you know d can you envision a scenario in which it would be possible to um have a policy that seeks to reduce the role of nuclear weapons at the same time adds countries to a nuclear umbrella or are those two things just irreconcilable i'm sorry reducing the role of nuclear weapons while so i'm sorry while expanding the the nuclear umbrella is that is that sort of irreconcilable you know i mean because it seems like well i mean i actually think they're different questions um you know when reducing the role in my view is you know the circumstances under which you would contemplate use and you know if okay that's a different question from extending uh formal alliances and and the nuclear umbrella to other countries in my view i think obviously that's a very the hot the bar for that is and should be very high um and it really has to be thought through like any national security major decision what are the secondary you know tertiary you know consequences that are going to ensue from that and where does that leave you in terms of your net security and that of the country you're trying to help protect i'll just notice without any um you know without any comment on my views on nato enlargement i was shocked by that by around 2008 when i was on senate armed services committee that we had gotten to the point where the round that round of nato enlargement and i apologize i can't remember which three countries it was actually went through by like unanimous consent in the dark at night and you know it's it's in and yet if you asked americans do we realize you know that we're you know committed to defend those countries i mean you know people don't understand that my only point isn't not that we shouldn't do it but that you know that commitment means a tremendous a lot amount and so any consideration of extending it you know deserves very very careful consideration thank you so we are really um rebecca kind of a quick footnote on that i just just thinking about taiwan of course it bears pointing out of course that taiwan is not threatened by prc nuclear weapons at least not directly um this the nuclear related threat from a taiwan perspective i would imagine is of conventional harm such as invasion facilitated by that could be seen to create or could be felt by beijing to create space in which it has the opportunity uh to uh to to you know to indulge itself in a sort of theater conventional sense by scaring us off from intervention by threatening you know say chicago uh you know do you really want to protect dave at the cost of chicago kind of thing that's an age old problem of alliance decoupling in a sense but i think that's where the nuclear threat to taiwan comes so an extension of a nuclear umbrella to taiwan would in a sense be uh you know it would be an explicit response to conventional threat uh it would make me smile to see inheritance of soul-purpose theory advocate such an extension yeah come to think of it if i could just add i've been hearing uh from chinese experts lately and in second track that you know exactly that chris that uh oh we we would never want to see nuclear weapons used in taiwan that's that's you know that's chinese territory why would we want to see that happen so that definitely that that line is out there but that complexity is exactly the one that's most inherent in extended deterrence for at large right i mean that most extended deterrence arrangements were born out of a need to respond or prepare for conventional attack but for which we might not be able to deliver a sufficiently fast conventional response i mean that's true in the nato context that's certainly how we think of uh you know at least part of the concern on the korean peninsula so um it's hard not to put the declaratory policy and extended deterrence policy somewhat together when contemplating those options right right and those points are exhibit a and the intellectual incoherence of soul purpose theory um well the good news is i can leave that one right there for the moment because i guess the last word [Laughter] well it certainly uh it leaves us much to discuss which there always is in this area um there are so many rich threads to pull um that there's never really enough time i will apologize to anyone in the q a that did i didn't manage to get to their question or their theme as as it went um but it just is a reminder that this is a rich and robust discussion that we could have uh much longer but part of my responsibility as your moderator is to respect your time and try to bring us to a close on time so i will do that while expressing my sincere appreciation to the three of you for your thoughtful comments and um you know all forms of respectful disagreement we're always really happy to sponsor here at pony so thank you so much for that i look forward to seeing each one of you um in the days and weeks ahead and i truly hope that we have the chance to meet in person and not just virtually so you know here's to hoping the fall brings us a healthier time for the country in the world so with that i thank you i join with our participants in a virtual round of applause um and very much appreciate you being with us as we wrap up the panel what i'm going to do is just thank all of you for being with us over the last two days for participating in our nuclear trilemma conference and i'm perfectly fine with the idea that part of the central debate is whether in fact a trilemma exists and if so how and under which conditions um i think it just goes to show it once again that we have a lot to discuss as we wrap up i want to again thank our sponsor northrop grumman who provided so much of the resources that allowed us to have this public conference i do want to remind all the participants again to please follow what we do at pony please visit our website at nuclearnetwork.com you have the chance to sign up for our nuclear news that goes out usually five days a week with some of the publications and what's being said out in the community you can get on our newsletter and find about about our activities and either you if you or someone who that fits this definition or if you are a mentor to someone coming up through this field think about encouraging them to participate in our conferences and events that are designed to help cultivate that next generation of thinkers and practitioners in nuclear policy so we really look forward to all of the events to come and your final reminder is that of course this conference has been on the record it has been recorded and that means you'll have the opportunity to see it a second time as soon as those recordings are published um but seriously you can also share with your friends and colleagues and uh keep the conversation going uh please feel free to be in touch with us if you have questions concerns or comments and again thank you to everyone for participating and we look forward to seeing you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 6,176

Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics, PONI, Nuclear, Alliances, Triad, Modernization, Arms Control

Id: 5RD3l6_7RW8

Length: 180min 49sec (10849 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021